The trial against an alleged ISIS-K plotter involved in the deadly Abbey Gate attack began on Monday with jury selection and opening arguments, with the Justice Department saying Mohammed Sharifullah confessed to his role while the defense team insisted the DOJ had the wrong guy.

Mohammad Sharifullah, also known as “Jafar," has been charged with a single count of providing and conspiring to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization — ISIS-K — which resulted in death. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge, and the trial against him in a Northern Virginia federal courthouse started this week.

Trump thanked Pakistan for “helping arrest this monster”

Sharifullah's capture — in a joint effort between Pakistani intelligence and U.S. spy agencies — was announced by President Donald Trump at a joint session of Congress in March of last year. Trump has thanked Pakistan for “helping arrest this monster.” Trump called Sharifullah “the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity” which killed thirteen U.S. service members on August 26, 2021.

The jury pool in the Northern Virginia area just outside the nation’s capital included a number of potential jurors linked to the U.S. government, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the U.S. military, and law enforcement.

Out of the seven dozen or so people in the jury pool, twelve jurors and three alternates were selected. Among the fifteen jurors and alternates, six were men and nine were women, and ten were white, while one was black, one was brown, and two were Asian. Judge Anthony Trenga, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by President George W. Bush, is presiding over the trial in Alexandria, Virginia.

The oath was administered to the jurors, and the judge instructed them that “you will decide this case solely on the evidence presented in this courtroom.” The Justice Department and Sharifullah’s defense team had fought over proposed jury instructions in the days leading up to the jury selection.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gibbs said during his opening argument that ISIS-K is a designated foreign terrorist organization, and that it is a “crime to provide material support to an FTO like ISIS-K.” The DOJ attorney said that Sharifullah admitted to helping with reconnaissance and with the transportation of the suicide bomber in an attack on Nepalese security guards for the Canadian Embassy in Kabul in 2016.

Gibbs said that the defendant also provided “granular detail” about his alleged participation in numerous other terrorist attacks, including a deadly ISIS-K attack in Moscow in 2024. The DOJ attorney said that Sharifullah also confessed to helping with an attempted IED attack against an Afghan police station in Kabul in 2019, where the defendant was arrested as he allegedly attempted to film the attack.

Sharifullah was arrested in 2019 and was put in Pul-e-Charkhi prison near Kabul. Once the Taliban seized Kabul, they "emptied the prisons” including the one where Sharifullah was held. “Almost as soon as he was released” from prison, he linked up with ISIS-K again and participated in plotting related to the Abbey Gate attack, Gibbs said.

Sharifullah: "Catch the crusaders and kill them"

 The DOJ attorney pointed to a 2020 interview by Sharifullah when he was still imprisoned, where he allegedly said, “The feeling was just to catch the crusaders and kill them, that’s all” and that his goal had been to “Be strong against the infidels […] Take them and kill them hard.”

Gibbs said that “this attack” — the Abbey Gate bombing — “is where the defendant succeeded at striking at the crusader.”

An ISIS-K suicide bomber named Abdul Rahman al-Logari — who had been freed by the Taliban from a prison at Bagram Air Base in mid-August 2021, mere weeks after the U.S. abandoned the base — has been identified as having carried out the suicide attack at Abbey Gate. That murder spree killed 13 U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians while wounding dozens of other U.S. troops and scores of Afghans in the crowd, on August 26, 2021.

The prosecutor said that Sharifullah ID’ed a photo of Logari and named him, with the DOJ attorney saying that the duo had both spent time at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. Gibbs stressed that the defendant had confessed to a recon role in the Abbey Gate plot.

The Abbey Gate attack, in which a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest, killed 11 Marines, one Army soldier, one Navy corpsman and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians, while wounding dozens of other U.S. troops and scores of Afghans in the crowd.

FBI has said Sharifullah was read his Miranda rights 

The Pentagon, under President Joe Biden, had argued that the Abbey Gate attack was not preventable – going so far as to say it still would have occurred even if the bomber had remained behind bars rather than being freed by the Taliban — despite a host of evidence indicating that the attack did not have to happen the way it did.

The FBI has said Sharifullah was read his "Miranda rights" by the FBI in March and that the alleged terrorist proceeded to tell them he was recruited into ISIS-K around 2016. The FBI said the terrorist was imprisoned in Afghanistan from approximately 2019 until two weeks before the Kabul airport attack.

Sharifullah has been charged with providing material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization resulting in death, and he faces a potential life sentence.

The FBI has said Sharifullah was contacted by another ISIS-K member upon being freed from prison in mid-August 2021 who connected him with the plot to attack U.S. forces at the airport. The bureau said ISIS-K members provided Sharifullah with a motorcycle, funds for a cell phone and instructions on using social media to communicate with them in the lead-up to the attack.

Defense attorney Geremy Kamens insisted Monday that his client was innocent, and hinted that the defense team would argue that the Taliban — and not Sharifullah — had actually been involved in the Abbey Gate plot.

“We know a lot about the Abbey Gate attack [...] It was horrific,” Kames said. The defense lawyer continued, saying "The question in this case is not really about what happened. But about who is responsible. [...] Mr. Sharifullah had nothing to do with the actual attack that day. The U.S. government got the wrong man.”

The defense attorney noted that the Taliban took Kabul in mid-August 2021. “Then something crazy happened [...] The Taliban offered to help,” Kamens said. “Then something crazier happened: Rear Admiral Pete Vasely accepted their offer of help.”

Kamens said that the Taliban militants who took up security positions around the Kabul airport “were no ordinary Taliban soldiers” — they were members of the Haqqani Network Taliban. The defense attorney asserted that “it is very likely” that the Haqqani Taliban helped with the Abbey Gate attack, and contended that “it is extremely likely that this was an inside job” that was “done with the help of the Haqqani Network.”

Defense makes excuses for confession

Kamens said that his client’s confession to doing reconnaissance for the bombing “makes no sense” and suggested Sharifullah had confessed because his pregnant wife and children had allegedly been imprisoned by the Pakistanis as well when Sharifullah himself had been arrested in Pakistan.

The defense attorney claimed that Trump had called Sharifullah the “mastermind” of the attack, and pointed out that the DOJ was not claiming that. While an unnamed U.S. official told the press Sharifullah was the “mastermind” of the attack, there is no evidence that Trump specifically called him that.

FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted shortly after Trump's announcement last year that "tonight the FBI, DOJ, and CIA have extradited one of the terrorists responsible for the murder of the 13 American soldiers at Abbey Gate during the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. One step closer to justice for these American heroes and their families."

It has been revealed that Sharifullah confessed to the FBI that he played a key reconnaissance role in the bombing at the gate of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the U.S.'s final evacuation from the country. The FBI has said that Sharifullah confessed to being involved in “route reconnaissance” in the lead-up to the Abbey Gate attack.

The bureau said Sharifullah also confessed to a role in facilitating a June 2016 suicide bombing attack which killed more than ten guards tasked with protecting the Canadian embassy. At the time, that suicide bomber was widely reported to have been part of the Taliban — not ISIS-K — and the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The FBI has said Sharifullah also claimed to have trained ISIS-K gunmen for a deadly attack on a concert hall in Moscow in 2024.

Major General Buck Elton and Captain Joshua Fruth assessed in late 2021 in an official U.S. Air Force website that “the Taliban may have leveraged ISIS–K as a proxy straw man layer of separation to oversee and/or facilitate the attack on U.S. service members and Afghan civilians” at the airport.

Long list of potential witnesses filed by prosecution

The DOJ provided a list of 27 possible trial witnesses earlier this month, and prosecutors on Sunday filed an 18-page proposed exhibit list as well. Judge Trenga, who is handling the Sharifullah case, previously blocked efforts by the CIA and the ODNI to terminate intelligence officers who had been tied to so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts during the Biden administration.

Trenga, the judge who also oversaw special counsel John Durham’s case against the Russian-born Igor Danchenko, hamstrung the special counsel ahead of the October 2022 trial.

The Eastern District of Virginia is known for handling many national security cases, and Trenga, who has also been a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since May 2020, has been the presiding judge on the secretive court since May 2023.

The judge predicted Monday that the Sharifullah trial would last five to seven days, and that proceedings would not be held this coming Friday, and so the trial is likely to extend into next week.

A number of Abbey Gate Gold Star family members were present in the courtroom gallery to watch the start of the trial. Sharifullah himself was present in the courtroom, being escorted in and out of the room by security guards.