From the August 26, 2021, edition of CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto

NICK PATON WALSH (CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT): So just to one point that your previous guest, H.R. McMaster, was making to do with the insurgency here. You know, this is a very complex series of extremists, and while ISIS-K has been the terror group people have been pointing at, excessively I think, for the last two or three days — or a lot, over the last two or three days.

There are also — this sort of attack, a suicide attack, is something which we’ve seen a lot from, from a network called the Haqqanis, they are affiliated with al-Qaeda, they were sort of subsumed into the Taliban recently as part of changes they made four, five years ago. So, we’re looking within the possible candidates here, if indeed it turns out to be a terror attack — and your reporting about a suicide attack makes that almost inevitable — there is not necessarily just one potential candidate here.

And I should point, as well, it does appear according to some reporting that elements of the Haqqani network were provided the job of doing security around the airport, as well. So, this enormously fraught situation, which you know, to some degree there were deep fears we could have seen this before. But the crushing instead and the chaos seemed to take over, has potentially many different suspects, Jim.

JIM SCIUTTO (CNN ANCHOR): No question, many groups capable. By the way, the Taliban, a group that carried out many hundreds of terror attacks in that country themselves that targeted Afghan civilians, like this one appeared to have targeted as well as U.S. forces here.