The U.S. military has removed at least half a dozen photographs from public view that captured a “ramp ceremony” and American troops paying tribute to the 13 service members killed in the Aug. 26, 2021 suicide bomb attack outside Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate, Task & Purpose has confirmed.
A U.S. official told Task & Purpose that the pictures were removed from a public database of official photos due to a miscommunication between the Defense Department’s mortuary affairs and the public affairs officer on the ground at the time. The official said the photos were initially meant for the families of the fallen service members, not the public. They were removed from public view afterward according to existing Defense Department instructions.
However, the images have been widely used since their initial release, including in The Guardian, Reuters, The Washington Post, and Task & Purpose.
No further information was immediately available on when the miscommunication on the ground occurred or when they were unpublished.
The 11 Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army soldier who were killed gave their lives to allow as many Afghans as possible to escape from the Taliban. The day after the attack, their comrades paid tribute to the fallen troops as 13 transfer cases covered by American flags were loaded onto a C-17 transport plane during a ramp ceremony at the airport.
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The moving images of the ceremony captured by a Marine photographer include two pictures of Marines solemnly carrying one of the transfer cases as their brothers and sisters in arms look on. In one of those pictures, a Marine serving as a pallbearer has his head bowed as he helps to carry the transfer case.
Another picture shows two Marines supporting each other during the ramp ceremony. One Marine has his hand on his buddy’s helmet. The second is holding his friend’s shoulder.
Yet another picture shows US troops holding hands over the transfer cases after they had been loaded into the C-17. And one of the pictures shows a handwritten message left by one of the troops at Hamid Karzai International Airport on the American flag covering a transfer case.
While these images are still available through Facebook and Wikipedia, as of Monday — the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack — they have been removed from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, or DVIDS, a vast Pentagon-run archive of images, videos, news stories, and other public domain material generated by the military that is open for use by the public and media outlets.
DVIDs is where public affairs officers and employees across the military post and share photos of service members engaging in virtually every kind of daily work, ceremonies and training. Hundreds of photos are uploaded to the system everyday. The system includes thousands of photos from military funerals and memorial ceremonies, including ubiquitous many dozens of photos of coffins of those killed in combat.
This is the most recent example of material related to Afghanistan being removed from DVIDS. In November 2021, then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed that more than 120,000 pictures and 17,000 had been unpublished from DVIDS to protect Afghans who worked with the U.S.-led coalition from the Taliban.
“We removed thousands of still imagery and videos that would show the faces or any other identifiable information about many of the Afghans that we have worked for and we have supported and who have supported us over the last 20 years,” Kirby said at the time. “This was an abundance of caution that we felt was necessary in keeping with our obligation to protect the identities of our Afghan allies and partners. When we don’t feel that that need is there, then we will absolutely republish them.”
Kirby was not exaggerating the danger that the United States’ Afghan allies faced after the Taliban took over the country. A 2023 report from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, found at least 800 examples of the reprisals against members of the former Afghan government and its security forces, including arbitrary arrests, torture, and killings.
It was not immediately clear if any of those pictures or videos have since been republished.
See the ramp ceremony photos below:
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