President Joe Biden falsely claimed to be the first president in the last decade not to have U.S. service members die on his watch, ignoring the 13 Americans who died at Abbey Gate during Biden's disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.
"Truth is, I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any—this, this decade—that don't [have] any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did," Biden said during Thursday night's debate. Thirteen service members died in the suicide bombing attack at the Kabul airport on August 26, 2021.
The attack marked one of the deadliest days for American forces in Afghanistan in the last decade.
Experts on the subject have argued that the Biden administration's reliance on the Taliban during the withdrawal is to blame for the attack.
The suicide bomber who detonated an explosive belt at the airport’s Abbey Gate, killing 13 U.S. service members and injuring 45 more, was "Abdul Rahman al-Logari, an ISIS-K terrorist who was freed from the Bagram prison by the Taliban," House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) revealed in April.
Biden has faced criticism from the families of the 13 deceased service members for his response to their deaths.
"He has not reached out to our family," Christy Shamblin, the mother-in-law of Sgt. Nicole Gee, a Marine who was killed during the bombing, told CNN earlier this year. "We've actually reached out to the White House and have never heard back. We asked to meet with them to kind of understand where their thinking was in calling [the withdrawal] a success. It's been months."