The world was gripped by the recent bombings at the Kabul international airport, coming amidst the evacuations of many thousands of foreign nationals and Afghanis seeking to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. The airport was jammed with people trying to leave. It was a situation that was a security nightmare, with a government not yet formed, panic among the people seeking to leave and warnings of an imminent attack just hours before the event. At latest count, over 182 people were killed with at least 150 injured. Many questions have been raised and as yet are unanswered. But this event will change the face of Afghanistan. And as an effort to possibly sow wider chaos in that country, it has already backfired. But another specter has raised its head, one that is all too familiar for us now.
This post will not be for the faint-hearted and will not be easy for some people to read, but certain facts have emerged after the event that need to be presented, and which will lead to unintended consequences for the perpetrators. So, we start with Wikipedia, which has the following entry:
On 26 August 2021 at 17:50 local time (13:20 UTC), during the 2021 evacuation of Afghanistan, a suicide bombing occurred near Abbey Gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, a second bombing occurred several dozen metres away. [This was since retracted] At least 182 people were killed, including 169 Afghan civilians and 13 United States military, who were the first American military casualties in Afghanistan since February 2020.
Whoever wrote this is not American, judging by the spelling. We also note the emphasis on ‘the first Americans killed since 2020’. There is also this, regarding the bombing:
The attack was carried out by ISIS-K, who released a statement in which they claimed responsibility for the attack and named the suicide bomber. They also released the following claim:
“With the help of Allah Almighty, the martyrdom brother (Abd al-Rahman al-Logari), may Allah Almighty accept him, was able to penetrate the security barriers imposed by the Crusaders and apostates around Kabul Airport where he was surrounded by a large gathering of American forces, translators and spies cooperating with them at (Baran Camp) in the vicinity of (Kabul Airport), then he detonated his explosive belt on them, as a result of which about 160 people were killed and wounded, including more than 20 members of the American forces.”
Wikipedia is notorious for being an unreliable source on foreign reporting, taking its lead from establishment news publications – i.e., Western and Western-friendly news outlets. Independent sources are rarely cited and information that runs counter to established narratives are not cited. This has been noted widely by independent journalists.
We’ll come back to Wikipedia, but why quote it if the source is unreliable? Firstly, there is the time stamp, which will put astrologers in the ball park when it comes to casting the chart. There was another source for the time of the incident, which was revealed later, and that was by the New York Times, also an unreliable source when it comes to foreign reporting. But their time stamp for the incident gives 17:58, which gives a more descriptive chart and, most importantly, the appropriate aspects and midpoints to the angles. We’ll come back to the “Grey Lady” (NYT), too.
The bombing, as described in establishment (mainstream) press, was a simple suicide bombing by a rogue group, IS-K. But as the opening paragraph states, there is more to this story, and that is where the label of ‘conspiracy’ will be rolled out. However, the chart shows the likelihood of deception around the event as well as narrative-steering. With that in mind, we have a look at the chart for the indicators of control and deception, which is below (bigger):
The first standout is the partile square, within two arc-seconds, to the Meridian axis from the 1st house, showing control (Saturn) of appearances (1st house), i.e. ‘narrative steering’. In addition, Saturn is in Aquarius (showing something unusual around the incident) and retrograde (not a straightforward execution of the event, and with blow-back on the perpetrators). Pardon the ‘execution’ remark, but it will have significance as we go along. The first house always represents the presentation/appearance of the event. Saturn also represents planning, and it is semisquare Neptune (deception, nebulosity in its lower expression) from the 2nd house (the ‘cui bono’ house in an event chart). The 8th house also shows ‘cui bono’, especially that of aggressors in an incident.
Saturn rules the Ascendant, which is Capricorn. There are several curious connections here: Capricorn (among many other things) rules gates, hysteria, concentrations (as in concentrations of people, in this case), depressive atmospheres, difficulties, Afghanistan, cells or areas for confinement, and – along with Saturn – terror.
The people who were killed and injured in the bombing were crowded into a narrow canal area, with knee-deep run-off water in the canal and narrow walkways on either side, which water was no doubt quite polluted by that point. The attack came at the Abbey Gate, where US military personnel were checking people’s documents. To say there were difficulties at the time would be an understatement. To say that people were desperate, even hysterical to leave would be accurate. That the bombing took place in Afghanistan is beyond dispute. And it goes without saying the bombing resulted in terror.
The Ascendant also represents the purpose or appearance of an act in a mundane chart, bringing us to the midpoints. All midpoints shown on the chart are by the 45° (hidden) modulus. The following midpoints are of particular relevance here:
- Sun=Ura/Nep: “Lack of vitality, a sensitive physique, impressionability. – Unconsciousness, illness, lifelessness or impassiveness.”
- Asc=Ura/Nep: “A person who is influenced easily, instability, hyper-sensitiveness. – The state of being depressed or sad together with others.”
Regarding the latter midpoint, there is usually hypervigilance around such events, especially when warnings have been given, but someone in this case dropped the ball. The same Sun and Ascendant form midpoints with the Venus/Pluto midpoint, the latter being found in ‘fanatical love’ – religious fanatics as well, as in being ‘madly in love’. That is coupled with the Moon (ruling the 7th house, the bomber) square to Pluto, manifesting as extremes in emotions, as one would see in a suicide bomber, for instance.
There is a theme formed by these midpoints, then, showing a fanatic influence (the bomber), along with a lack of awareness (The Ura/Nep midpoint shows up in cases of epilepsy, for instance) or distraction due to the pressing of people and the instability of the situation. It is easy to say after the fact, but had there been an orderly evacuation (if one such would have been possible), security would have been tighter, with more vigilance.
Then, we move to the Meridian axis and its midpoints. We have Saturn square that axis, described previously, with both of them forming midpoints with the Mercury/Neptune midpoint. The latter is the classic ‘liar’s midpoint’. Coupling that with the Saturn/MC square, this is very telling – that this bombing was meant to send a specific message, but one that hid the truth of the event. In other words, this was more than just a simple suicide bombing planned and perpetrated by a group of fanatic takfiris. We’ll get to why after we finish the astrology.
Some of the last factors in the chart are the remaining midpoints shown, and there are three in particular, all with Mars, the latter governing violence and militarism:
- Mars=Ura/Asc: “A vigorous or active intervention in one’s environment, the inclination to becoming physically violent. – The suffering of threats, injuries or wounds.”
- Mars=Plu/MC: “A great striving for the attainment of power, the urge to dominate other people.”
- Mars=Sat/Plu: “Brutality, assault or violence, ruthlessness. – The necessity to fight for one’s existence or life, maltreatment.”
To finish the astrology, there is a partile square between Pluto and Eris, with Pluto in the 1st house and Eris in the 3rd (‘the narrative’ house) conjunct the Moon (the bomber). Eris is the planet of discord, “She who accompanied Mars on the battlefield” in mythology. The discord that followed after the bombing left more people dead than the act itself did – actually many more. If on-the-ground reports are to be believed, the facts do not gibe with the official accounting of events. From here we begin to have a closer look at the scene, and this is where those events will be difficult to hear. We start with some background on IS-K.
So, IS-K pulled off this attack. Just who is this ISIS-K? They are an official affiliate of Daesh (ISIS), the acronym standing for ‘Islamic State Khorasan Province’. The current Khorasan province is a region in the eastern-most part of Iran. It used to be an independent country, Greater Khorasan, which included part of current neighboring states to Iran, notably Afghanistan.
IS-K set itself up in what was once Afghani Khorasan. The group started with Pakistani militants:
The IS fighters who pioneered the Khorasan franchise of the IS were Pakistani militants who had long been settled in the southeastern districts of Nangarhar, in the Spin Ghar mountains or its foothills, bordering the tribal agencies on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line.
Before choosing to join ISKP, these militants operated under different brands, mainly under the umbrella of the ever-loosening Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP). The bulk of these militants had been arriving in Nangarhar since 2010 mainly from the Orakzai, North Waziristan and Khyber tribal agencies. According to local residents, the first groups of Pakistani militants arrived in Nangarhar from Orakzai following an operation by the Pakistani army that year. They moved into Afghanistan, often with their families, apparently to flee military operations by the Pakistani army.
The TTP is rumoured to be supported by Indian secret services (RAW) to be used against the Pakistan government. From the same link, the group has been isolated in the Nangarhar province, close to Kabul, since 2016, despite their ambitions for influence across Afghanistan. Jalalabad is the capital of Nangarhar province. We know that Daesh was created as a result of American actions in Iraq and have since been aided and abetted largely by the US, UK and the Turks.
At one time IS-K also had the support of the Afghan puppet government, who recruited them to fight against the Taliban. The recruiting was done by the Afghan secret service (NDS). The NDS was headed by Saleh, who is now in Panjshir province, having proclaimed himself acting president of Afghanistan and supposedly heading the Panjshir resistance. He is also a CIA asset. From the preceding, we now have the makings of a resistance/terrorist force in Afghanistan that would be funded by the US in order to keep Afghanistan destabilized under Taliban rule, this keeping a toehold in the country. As Philip Giraldi recently wrote, “Here come the terrorists. Again”.
On the 23rd of August, CIA Director William Burns flew to Afghanistan and met secretly with top Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar had been held in a Pakistani prison for 8 years, having been released in 2018 at the behest of the Trump administration ahead of talks for the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan. Burns had asked for an extension of the August 31st deadline, but was flatly refused. A couple of days later we began to hear about the threat of attacks at the airport.
As to the bombing itself, the gathering of such a large crowd at the airport in such a disorganized extraction process was a ripe opportunity for a terrorist attack. Elijah Magnier warned of the possibility a few hours before it happened, as did US and UK officials. How did the latter know an attack was imminent? On the other side, it was actually quite predictable. Magnier went on later to add that 28 of the dead were Taliban, a fact never mentioned in Western media. Also never mentioned are the 30 dual British-Afghan nationals who died in the melee. The Taliban were as much victims in the attack as innocent civilians and American soldiers. These facts about the dead do not get a mention in Wikipedia, for example.
Returning to Wikipedia, an article by Politico was cited, stating that IS-K militants were firing into the crowd immediately following the blast. That is a lie. The Grey Lady also rolled out the same tall tale. Reports from on the ground from many people say it was American and Turkish troops, or possibly Afghan special forces who were firing into the crowd from the towers in the panic of the moment. The IS-K militants would have had to be inside the walls of the airport to fire on the crowd, which was in the canal area. Those articles were an attempt to whitewash what happened.
A BBC reporter was on the ground interviewing Afghanis after the bombing, with video showing the area where the victims were shot (if it is still up on Twitter). One of the interviewees described the trajectory of the bullets that killed most of the victims. The canal area clearly has walls on either side and it has guard towers along its course.
Citizen reporting, speaking with a man from the hospital coroner’s office described (8:55 – 13:24) what he found in the victims, and reported that only about 20 people were killed by the blast, the remainder of the dead having bullet wounds in the head and upper chest that could only have come from above. The video is in Pashto, but one of the comments below the video translated the pertinent part If. so, it means that many of the dead were killed by NATO (American and Turkish) forces, panicked by the blast. That kind of melee and the misreporting by the West is borne out in the astrology of the event. But any reports of Western troops killing unarmed civilians will be deeply buried, except in independent media.
The blast and carnage that resulted has raised several uncomfortable questions:
Firstly, why is it that every time that the US is withdrawing or looking to leave a conflict zone, a Daesh terrorist attack suddenly occurs against its forces. The same happened in Syria 2019, when a Daesh terrorist blew himself up in the town of Manbij, killing US troops, just as former president Donald Trump had announced his intention to withdraw US troops out of Syria. Why is Daesh, a supposed “enemy” of the US, trying its hardest to make the US continue its occupation of these countries?
Secondly, isn’t it interesting that both British and French intelligence allegedly had knowledge about an imminent terrorist attack, several hours before it took place and didn’t do anything to stop it? Isn’t it also interesting that the US who hasn’t conducted a single strike on Daesh in Afghanistan by the way, suddenly knew exactly who was behind the bombings and “took them out” with pinpoint accuracy only a day after the bombings? And thirdly, isn’t it also interesting how the Pentagon refused to even release the names and identities of the supposed “planner and facilitator” that were killed, with spokesman John Kirby holding a mock press conference and refusing to answer any question whatsoever from the multiple journalists in place?
Similar questions have been raised by other journalists. There was also an ‘eerily prophetic’ CNN interview with a senior commander of…IS-K. Now, that would be a trick. And it was two weeks ago. Was CNN invited by IS-K (perhaps they are all on friendly terms or old mates), or did they just pop over to Afghanistan, look this guy up in the on-line directory and invite him for an interview? And this guy said they (IS-K) were just ‘laying low and waiting for their time to strike’. That was at the point the Taliban were making rapid advances in the countryside. The comments under that RT article almost with one voice called the interview a CIA psy-op, or words to that effect. The entire interview was a farce and laughable.
Just after the bombing, Pepe Escobar had this comment from his VK social media channel:
KABUL BOMBING UPDATE
It was Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban Minister of information in Kabul, who’s talking to the media virtually everyday, that warned NATO about an imminent ISIS-K suicide bombing – and now, it seems, according to their procedure, double bombing.
Taliban intel is on a do-or-die fight against ISIS-K. NEVER FORGET that ISIS-K has become much more powerful in Afghanistan these past few months because, among other things, a transportation rat line from idlib, facilitated by…guess who?
Never forget the name of the entity in question: Empire of CHAOS [US/UK]. Chaos em Kabul suits only one player. And just like clockwork, it’s already being spun; the Taliban “are not capable” of providing security.
How do we know there is a terrorist ratline from Idlib? We know the Russians ansd the SAA are stepping up attacks on Idlib. We know the Trump administration had inked a deal to get the American troops out (who are now gone from Afghanistan as of this writing). We know the CIA and other Beltway types would like to keep a foot in Afghanistan.
Researcher and commentator Hadi Nasrallah noted on Friday that the leader of the Middle East resistance group Hezbollah “said that the US have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran.”
Hezbollah is not the first player in the area to make the accusation of the US setting up a ratline via helicopter flights to Afghanistan for ISIS: Russia and Iran, which borders Afghanistan, have been for some time.
As Hadi Nasrallah noted, Syra and Iraq have said more or less the same, with Syrian state media SANA saying in 2017 reporting that “US helicopters transported between 40 and 75 ISIS militants from Hasakah, North Syria to an ‘unknown area.’”
IS-K has had ample time to set up sleeper cells throughout Adfghanistan. That brings us to the question of cui bono – who has benefitted from the airport bombing? It would not appear to be IS-K, since American troops are now gone. It was the Americans they targeted. And now they are targeted. The Taliban had infiltrated their organization and have the names of all their operatives. Now the Taliban are going hunting, hence the reports we are getting of Taliban ‘invading people’s homes’. No doubt, the Taliban will also have willing help from the Russians, as well as the Chinese and Iranians, who all want to see terrorism eliminated in the region.
Gains by an attacker or belligerent is shown by the 8th house in such a chart. The Sun rules the 8th house of the airport bombing chart. Gains to his minders would be shown by the 2nd house, ruled by Uranus. Uranus is trine to Mars in the chart. What this event has done is to stir uncertainty in Afghanistan and it is being used, for instance, by France and the UK to seek a ‘security zone’ around Kabul in the UN, under UN auspices. Their effort failed, and the Taliban would reject it because it would mean foreign troops in the country again. The Sun is sextile the MC of the chart. It was a high profile event and IS-K certainly got notice. But the real beneficiary of the event are the people who funded IS-K. We’ll leave who that is to the reader’s imagination.
What can we expect going forward, now that foreign military units have all withdrawn from Afghanistan? We can expect more IS-K activity. We can expect Western powers to seek to wrangle some way to keep a foothold in the country. IS-K would be instrumental there. But, we can also expect the SCO to step in, and soon, to help the Taliban purge the IS-K threat. These next months going forward will be difficult in Afghanistan and the country will be under a magnifying glass.
The Taliban will have significant help, even while the Western powers seek to covertly upend the transition of Afghanistan into an Islamic republic. Next month Iran is expected to be granted full membership in the SCO. Iran and the Taliban have had steadily warming relations since the turn of this century. Security in Afghanistan will quickly become a SCO matter, with the West increasingly sidelined.
What appears to have been attempted with the bombing was to destabilize the situation in Kabul, paint the Taliban to be incompetent with security, with an effort to follow to keep a foreign troop presence in Afghanistan, or at least in Kabul. That foreign troop presence would have been under UN auspices, but that is precisely why the French-UK effort failed. It would have entailed a veto in the UNSC by Russia and China, who know full well what UN peacekeeping missions mean.
The big winners in the long run and in an ironic twist will be Afghanis, who in the ensuing months and years will have better security (thanks to the SCO) and a more inclusive government, free of the corrupting influence of billions of dollars of Western ‘aid’, which to a large extent wound up in the pockets of regional warlords and a host of “American soldiers, arms manufacturers, globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, peacekeepers, counter-insurgency theorists and lawyers — all [who] made their fortunes.” From a previous link, it was precisely that corruption that allowed the Taliban to so quickly overtake the country and walk into Kabul largely unopposed.
The big losers from the bombing will ultimately be those self-same people just mentioned. And Joe Biden is facing the biggest crisis of his political career because of what has taken place with the withdrawal and chaos it produced. Word has it there is very heavy goings-on in Washington, but very little is leaking out. Apparently generals are revolting against Milley and Austin and now there are calls to impeach Biden or for him to resign. That might seem like simple political tit-for-tat, but there is more at play. The Beltway and the arms manufacturers and stockholders see Afghanistan as a monumental loss. Someone has to pay, to be the fall guy, but it won’t be the people who caused the catastrophe of Afghanistan to begin with.
Biden currently has a dual Mars emphasis to his Midheaven, by both direction and transit, showing the stress he is under and the knives out for his throat. He will likely survive for now. But the bombing at Kabul last week will dog Biden for the remainder of his term. At least now, the first American ‘forever war’ is finally ended. The troops are being repositioned. Now, perhaps, Afghanis can get on with rebuilding their country, and finally on their own terms.
Featured pic from Martin Rowson/The Guardian: We plough the fields…