KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Rockets struck a neighborhood near Kabul’s international airport on Monday amid the ongoing U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. It wasn’t immediately clear who launched them.

The rockets struck Monday morning in Kabul’s Salim Karwan neighborhood, witnesses said. Gunfire immediately followed the explosions but it wasn’t immediately clear who was firing.

The witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said they heard the sound of three explosions and then saw a flash in the sky. People fled after the blasts, they said.

U.S. officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. U.S. military cargo planes continued their evacuations at the airport after the rocket fire.

In Washington, the White House issued a statement saying officials briefed President Joe Biden on “the rocket attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport” in Kabul.

“The president was informed that operations continue uninterrupted at HKIA, and has reconfirmed his order that commanders redouble their efforts to prioritize doing whatever is necessary to protect our forces on the ground,” the statement said, using an acronym for Kabul’s airport.

On Sunday, a U.S. drone strike blew up a vehicle carrying “multiple suicide bombers” from Afghanistan’s Islamic State affiliate on Sunday before they could attack the ongoing military evacuation at Kabul’s international airport, American officials said. An Afghan official said three children were killed in the strike.

The U.S. is to withdraw from Afghanistan by Tuesday. By then, the U.S. is set to conclude a massive two-week-long airlift of more than 114,000 Afghans and foreigners and withdraw the last of its troops, ending America’s longest war with the Taliban back in power.

The U.S. State Department released a statement Sunday signed by around 100 countries, as well as NATO and the European Union, saying they had received “assurances” from the Taliban that people with travel documents would still be able to leave the country. The Taliban have said they will allow normal travel after the U.S. withdrawal is completed on Tuesday and they assume control of the airport.

However, Afghans remain fearful of the Taliban returning to the oppressive rule for which it was once known. There have been sporadic reports of killings and other abuses in the sweep across the country.

Earlier this week, an Islamic State suicide attack outside the airport killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members. The U.S. carried out a drone strike elsewhere in the country on Saturday that it said killed two members of the Islamic State’s local affiliate in Afghanistan, which has battled the Taliban in the past.

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Story: Kathy Gannon. Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Lou Kesten in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has vowed to keep up airstrikes against the Islamic extremist group whose suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed scores of Afghans and 13 American service members. He warned another attack was “highly likely” and the State Department called the threat “specific” and “credible.”

The Pentagon said the remaining contingent of U.S. forces at the airport, now numbering fewer than 4,000, had begun their final withdrawal ahead of Biden’s deadline for ending the evacuation on Tuesday.

After getting briefed on a U.S. drone mission in eastern Afghanistan that the Pentagon said killed two members of the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate early Saturday, Biden said Saturday the extremists can expect more.

“This strike was not the last,” Biden said in a statement. “We will continue to hunt down any person involved in that heinous attack and make them pay.” He paid tribute to the “bravery and selflessness” of the American troops executing the hurried airlift of tens of thousands from Kabul airport, including the 13 U.S. service members who were killed in Thursday’s suicide bombing at an airport gate.

The evacuation proceeded as tensions rose over the prospect of another IS attack. The State Department issued a new security alert early Sunday morning Kabul time instructing people to leave the airport area immediately “due to a specific, credible threat.”

“Our commanders informed me that an attack is highly likely in the next 24-36 hours,” Biden said, adding that he has instructed them to take all possible measures to protect their troops, who are securing the airport and helping bring onto the airfield Americans and others desperate to escape Taliban rule.

The remains of the 13 American troops were on their way to the United States, the Pentagon said. Their voyage marked a painful moment in a nearly 20-year American war that cost more than 2,400 U.S. military lives and is ending with the return to power of a Taliban movement that was ousted when U.S. forces invaded in October 2001.

The remains of troops killed in action overseas are usually flown back to the U.S. via Dover Air Base in Delaware, where fallen troops’ return to U.S. soil is marked by a solemn movement known as the “dignified transfer.”

The White House on Saturday did not say if Biden would travel to Dover for the troops’ return. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said shortly after the attack that the president “would do everything he can to honor the sacrifice and the service” of those killed.

The Pentagon released the names of those killed — 11 Marines, one Navy sailor and one Army soldier. Twelve of them were in the 20s; some were born in 2001, the year America’s longest war began. The oldest was 31.

They were the first U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan since February 2020, the month the Trump administration struck an agreement with the Taliban in which the militant group halted attacks on Americans in exchange for a U.S. agreement to remove all troops and contractors by May 2021. Biden announced in April that the 2,500 to 3,000 troops who remained would be out by September, ending what he has called America’s forever war.

With Biden’s approval, the Pentagon this month sent thousands of additional troops to the Kabul airport to provide security and to facilitate the State Department’s chaotic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who had helped the United States during the war. The evacuation was marred by confusion and chaos as the U.S. government was caught by surprise when the Afghan army collapsed and the Taliban swept to power Aug. 15.

About 5,400 Americans have been evacuated from the country so far, including 300 in the last day. The State Department believes about 350 more want out; it said there are roughly 280 others who have said they are Americans but who have not told the State Department of their plans to leave the country, or who have said they plan to remain.

Untold numbers of vulnerable Afghans, fearful of a return to the brutality of pre-2001 Taliban rule, are likely to be left behind. Biden and the leaders of other Western countries have said they would try to work with the Taliban to allow Afghans who had worked with them to leave after the U.S.-led evacuation ends.

The Pentagon said that about 6,800 people, mostly Afghans, were flown out in the 24 hours that ended Saturday morning, bringing to 113,500 the total number of people of all nationalities evacuated since the hurried exit was begun Aug. 14.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. military force at the Kabul airport, which peaked at about 5,800, had begun its final withdrawal. The number had dropped below 4,000 on Saturday, according to a U.S. official who discussed details not yet publicly released on condition of anonymity. Kirby said that for security reasons the Pentagon will not provide a day-by-day description of the final stages of the military’s withdrawal, which includes flying home troops as well as equipment.

The Pentagon said an airstrike early Saturday local time in the eastern province of Nangarhar, which borders Pakistan, killed two IS “planners and facilitators.”

“They have lost some capability to plan and to conduct missions, but make no mistake, nobody’s writing this off and saying, ‘Well, we got them. We don’t have to worry about ISIS-K anymore.’ Not the case,” Kirby told a news conference, using an abbreviation for the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan.

Biden also faces the problem over the longer term of containing an array of potential extremist threats based in Afghanistan, which will be harder with fewer U.S. intelligence assets and no military presence in the nation. Critics say Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan leaves the door open for al-Qaida, the Islamic State and other extremist groups to grow and potentially threaten the United States. It was al-Qaida’s use of Afghanistan as a base, with the Taliban’s acquiescence, that prompted the United States to invade the country in October 2001, beginning the longest war in U.S. history.

Saturday’s drone mission came less than two days after the Kabul attack and a public pledge by Biden that he would make IS “pay” for their suicide bomb attack. Officials made no claim that the two individuals killed played a direct role in Thursday’s Kabul airport attack.

Kirby declined to release the names and nationalities of the two killed. He said one other person was wounded in the strike. The speed with which the U.S. retaliated reflected its close monitoring of IS and years of experience in targeting extremists in remote parts of the world. But it also shows the limits of U.S. power to eliminate the threat from extremists, who some believe will have more freedom of movement in Afghanistan now that the Taliban is in power.

Kirby said the U.S. had “the ability and the means to carry over-the-horizon counterterrorism capabilities and we’re going to defend ourselves,” referring to the military’s use of aircraft based in the Persian Gulf area and elsewhere to carry out strikes in Afghanistan.

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Story: Robert Burns. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

HONOLULU (AP) — In Singapore, in between a foreign policy speech and a roundtable talk about supply chain issues, Vice President Kamala Harris stopped to smell the flowers.

Specifically, she checked out an orchid that the country named after her — a light fuschia hybrid named Papilionanda Kamala Harris — a diplomatic honor also bestowed on former President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden during past visits to the country.

“Oh, this is extraordinary,” she marveled as she took a brief tour of the lush Flower Field room of Singapore’s iconic Gardens By the Bay on Tuesday.

It was a brief — and rare — moment of normalcy for Harris during a diplomatic trip chock full of extraordinary circumstances.

Harris’ weeklong trip to Singapore and Vietnam was shadowed from start to finish by the crisis in Afghanistan. Questions about the messy U.S. withdrawal dominated her first few days in Singapore and the attack that killed 13 Americans outside the Kabul airport caused her to nix a planned visit to California on her way home.

In the middle, Harris delayed by a few hours her travel to Vietnam because of concern about potential health attacks against U.S. diplomats there.

And the trip itself played out against the backdrop of a global pandemic that kept Harris hemmed in by the carefully choreographed stagecraft of her diplomatic meetings with leaders and a smattering of roundtables and speeches.

But those very crises may in fact have contributed to what analysts say was the overall success of the trip.

“Buffeted by these concerns about things that were happening both in Hanoi and elsewhere, they held pretty steady,” said Ted Osius, who served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Obama.

“They delivered key messages to our partners and showed both continuity and a future for the relationships, by the fact that they had steady nerves and they continued with the trip, even despite these challenges.”

Amid the withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of Harris’ top tasks for the trip was to reassure U.S. allies that America can be trusted to stand by its commitments. Osius said the Vietnamese now “know that we trust each other enough to be able to carry on, even in turbulent, unusual times.”

Facing numerous questions about Afghanistan, Harris overall exhibited a more disciplined message than she did during her first foreign trip, to Guatemala and Mexico. There, she drew criticism from Democrats for warning migrants not to come to the U.S., and from Republicans for dismissing questions about her decision not to visit the U.S. southern border.

In Singapore, and again in Vietnam, Harris repeated administration talking points about the evacuation effort being the White House’s “highest priority” and avoided getting bogged down in recriminations over what went wrong.

“There wasn’t really anything to clean up, which obviously differentiates from that Guatemala and Mexico trip,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne.

Even so, Republicans took the opportunity to go after Harris — both a nod toward her possible political future, as the presumptive sucessor to Biden if he chooses not to run in 2024, and an attempt to take advantage of her generally divisive profile among U.S. voters.

Chris Martin, deputy executive director of GOP opposition research group America Rising, said on Twitter that “every assignment Kamala Harris has touched as VP has failed miserably,” including her latest efforts to reassure U.S. allies.

But Payne said Harris had showed a more polished and focused approach on her latest trip.

“My sense is that the vice president’s team has attempted to course correct a bit and simplify the message and simplify the task,” he said.

On confronting China — the trickiest diplomatic issue for Harris during the trip — the vice president struck a balance in delivering a rebuke of what she called China’s “bullying” in the South China Sea while also offering a more constructive vision for the U.S. relationship with Singapore and Vietnam.

While her visit offered up a number of new opportunities for cooperation between the U.S. and its Southeast Asian allies, it lacked one major touchstone of the typical diplomatic trip: engagement with local people.

When Biden visited Singapore as vice president, he stopped by a bustling hawker stall for a limeade. When Obama visited Vietnam, he was met with throngs of cheering Vietnamese after sharing a meal and a beer with Anthony Bourdain in a tiny noodle shop, and he beatboxed with Vietnamese youth.

With the coronavirus pandemic surging again across much of Southeast Asia, Harris and her entourage were largely confined to their hotel rooms. Upon arriving in both Singapore and Vietnam, the entire delegation received COVID-19 tests and had to quarantine in their hotel rooms until the results came through.

In Vietnam, a country with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the region and record high infections in recent weeks, the streets of Hanoi were eerily empty as Harris’ motorcade sped to her events. Instead of a spontaneous moment on the streets of Vietnam, Harris held a small roundtable with LGBTQ and climate change activists.

“Just like we had to reinvent domestically what a political campaign looks like — official travel is now subject to that same upheaval,” said Eric Schultz, who served as principal deputy press secretary for Obama.

“Building cultural relationships is person to person. When you take that out of the equation, it just becomes harder.”

Gregory Poling, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that while the pandemic complicated Harris’ trip, it also created opportunities to show the U.S. commitment to the region. Indeed, Harris deployed America’s vaccine diplomacy in Vietnam, where she announced the delivery of an additional 1 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine and 77 freezers to help store doses.

“It limits the number of engagements, it limits your engagement with civil society and others, it makes it harder to travel outside the capital — but it also helps reinforce the message that they are really investing in relationships there,” he said.

Story: Alexandra Jaffe

From the Great Wall to the picturesque Kashmir valley, Asia’s tourist destinations are looking to domestic visitors to get them through the COVID-19 pandemic’s second year.

With international travel heavily restricted, foreign tourists can’t enter many countries and locals can’t get out. In the metropolis of Hong Kong, glamping and staycations have replaced trips abroad for at least some of its 7.4 million residents.

Across the Asia-Pacific region, international tourist arrivals were down 95% in the first five months of the year, compared to the same period before the pandemic in 2019, according to the U.N. World Tourism Organization.

New variants of the virus loom — a constant threat to any recovery in even domestic tourism. Warnings of a possible third wave in India worry Imraan Ali, whose houseboat on Kashmir’s Dal Lake is his only source of income.

“Since we are expecting a good influx of tourists, we don’t want that to be affected,” he said.

INDIA CAUTIOUS AS OUTBREAK RECEDES

Tourists are returning to the valleys and mountains in Indian-controlled Kashmir, as infections in the Himalayan region and nationwide come down after a deadly second wave earlier this year.

The “shikaras,” or traditional Kashmiri houseboats, are back on the calm waters of Dal Lake as Indians travel at home. India is reporting about 30,000 new coronavirus cases a day, down from a peak of 400,000 in May but still enough for many countries to restrict travelers from India.

Nihaarika Rishabh said she and her husband were relieved to finally get away from their home in the city of Agra for their honeymoon, after their wedding was postponed during the second wave. The vacation in Kashmir has helped calm their nerves after months of the pandemic, she said.

Ali, the houseboat owner, is happy that the number of visitors has gone up. “We have been suffering from past two years,” he said. “Our livelihood depends on tourism.”

But mountainous areas like Kashmir have seen an uptick in infections as the number of visitors rises, fueling worries about a third wave.

BANGKOK’S BUSTLE GOES QUIET

Erawan Shrine in the center of Bangkok once bustled with foreign tourists and locals making offerings day and night. Today, it is eerily quiet. Only a handful of people buy incense or flowers from the vendors who set up stalls outside.

“We are still here because we don’t know what else to do,” said one, Ruedewan Thapjul.

As Thailand battles a punishing COVID-19 surge with nearly 20,000 new cases every day, people who depend on tourism struggle in what was one of the most-visited cities in the world, with 20 million visitors in the year before the pandemic.

Suthipong Pheunphiphop, the president of the Thai Travel Agents Association, urged the government to commit to its plan to reopen the country to foreign tourists in October.

Currently, the streets are all but empty in Bangkok’s Siam Square shopping district.

Passavee Kraidejudompaisarn, the third-generation owner of a popular noodle shop, wiped away tears as she talked about her fears of losing the family business.

Previously, the 60-year-old restaurant would be filled with locals and foreign tourists, bringing in about $2,000 a day. Now, she said, she earns a little more than $2 on some days.

CHINESE STAY IN CHINA

Strict virus control measures have allowed China to return to relatively normal life. The number of tourists visiting Beijing in June and July tripled compared to the same period last year, while revenue quadrupled, according to Trip.com, China’s largest online travel booking platform.

“I personally feel very safe,” Olaya Ezuidazu, a Spanish national living in Beijing, said on a recent visit to the Great Wall.

But even China is not immune to the delta variant. Outbreaks in July and August prompted authorities to suspended flights and trains to affected cities. Parks and museums reduced the number of visitors to 60% of capacity, down from 75% previously.

Phil Ma felt the resulting dent on tourism at his café in a traditional “hutong” neighborhood, steps away from Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. “It is obvious during the three or four days from the weekend to today that the number of guests has decreased a lot,” he said.

The alley outside his café was quiet, in contrast to the line that formed for a cup of coffee during a major holiday in May.

GLAMPING IN HONG KONG

The difficulty of traveling abroad has made glamping — or glamourous camping — popular in Hong Kong.

Berina Tam and Vincy Lee went with We Camp, a campsite located in Yuen Long, a rural area in the north of Hong Kong.

“It’s actually a good opportunity for us to really, to try to explore Hong Kong a bit more,” Tam said.

Many glamping sites provide clean beds, showering facilities and barbeque sites for campers to grill kebabs and chicken wings. The typical charge is $65 per person a night.

Bill Lau, the founder of Hong Kong travel platform Holimood, said that glamping offers an alternative for those who find camping too primitive.

“Families and couples need to find somewhere to go during weekends,” he said. “If we are trying to recreate the experience of traveling, it must be an overnight experience.”

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Story: Umar Meraj in Srinagar, India, Olivia Zhang in Beijing, Pattarachai Preechapanich in Bangkok and Katie Tam and Zen Soo in Hong Kong contributed.