New York/Washington, 2 May

US President Donald Trump has claimed that China now occupies the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, which was vacated by America in 2021.

The US vacated Bagram, its biggest airfield in the country, in July 2021.

"...But we were going to keep Bagram, the big Air Force base, which is one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. That's what they do. They make their nuclear missiles and one hour away from Bagram, and I said you can't give up Bagram,” Trump said while addressing the 2025 National Day of Prayer at the White House Thursday.

"They gave up Bagram, and right now, China occupies Bagram. So sad, so crazy. One of the biggest air bases in the world, among the strongest and longest runways anywhere in the world, one hour away from where China makes its nuclear missiles,” Trump said.

Blaming the Joe Biden administration, Trump said, “You wouldn't have had the horror show at Afghanistan, which I think is what gave (Russian President Vladimir) Putin the resolve to go in and do what he did because he looked at how badly we got out.

"We lost 13 soldiers, and  42 were horribly injured. Nobody ever talks about them, the legs, the arm, the arms, the face. Horribly injured, that would have never happened. Not even possible to have happened, and we would have been out before he was out,” Trump said.

He appeared to make a reference to the 26 August, 2021, Abbey Gate bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul that killed 13 United States military service members and about 160 civilians.

Trump has called the American withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden administration “disastrous and incompetent.”

"Not that they were withdrawing, it was the way they withdrew. Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” Trump had said in an address to the Joint Session of Congress earlier this year.  

 “It would have been great to have while we were keeping it, but they ran out of there like nobody could believe, and I think Putin saw that and he said, ‘Wow, this is a great time. I can go get it’ because it was the apple of his eye. I could always see that. I talked to him for hours. It was the apple of his eye, but I said, 'Vladimir, don't even think about it'. And he wouldn't have thought about it. But when he saw that, I think that's the reason actually he gained some additional courage, and he went in,” Trump said.

Bagram Airfield is located in Afghanistan's Parwan Province, approximately 11 kilometres southeast of the city of Charikar and 47 kilometres north of Kabul. The airfield has an 11,800-foot runway capable of serving bomber and large cargo aircraft.