A brazen Taliban assault on the Afghan capital was quelled yesterday after raging for 19 hours in a hail of rockets, grenades and suicide blasts that left at least 15 dead and six foreign troops wounded.
Afghan and foreign troops battled insurgents who targeted the US embassy and Nato headquarters, sowing fear and confusion and raising fresh questions over the Kabul government’s ability to secure the country even after a 10-year war.
The standoff ended when troops finally killed the two last insurgents who had held out overnight in a high-rise building under construction just a few hundred metres from the heavily guarded US embassy.
“The last attackers are dead and the fighting all over. There were six terrorists in the building and all are dead,” interior ministry spokesman Siddiq Siddiqui said.
Afghan forces at the scene fired guns in jubilation from the top of the building after quelling the assault, kicking and stoning the corpses of attackers left behind, an AFP photographer at the scene said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
By holding part of the city hostage over two days in their longest assault on the capital yet – the latest in a string of attacks on Western targets in recent months – the insurgents demonstrated their increasing confidence.
The raid was another sign that security has deteriorated sharply in Kabul, which was hit with a suicide bombing on the British Council cultural body last month and the storming of the luxury Intercontinental Hotel in June.
But the US ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, played it down, even though around six rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) landed in his embassy compound.
“This really is not a very big deal – a hard day for the embassy and my staff,” he said in a pooled media interview.
“Half a dozen RPG rounds from 800 metres away, that isn’t Tet (a key offensive in the Vietnam War), that’s harassment.”
Mr Crocker blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, a group allied with the Taliban seen as the insurgency’s driving force along Afghanistan’s porous border with Pakistan.
The insurgents, armed with suicide vests and rocket-propelled grenades, unleashed wave after wave of heavy explosions and gunfire after the attack started at around 1.30 p.m. (0900 GMT) on Tuesday.
Witnesses told of their terror as events unfolded.
“I was sitting in my shop when suddenly I heard an explosion and then another one. Then there was gunfire,” said Abdulbaqi, a local shopkeeper. “People on the streets started running.”