[Established
in 2006, the American University Afghanistan Kabul Afghanistan
By Mujib Mashal and Mohamad Fahim Abed
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A man who survived an
hourslong attack on the American University of Afghanistan
in Kabul described the
harrowing scene. Officials said at least 13 people were killed
and dozens were wounded by the
militants. Publish Date August 25, 2016.
Photo by Omar Sobhani/Reuters.
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Abdul
Basir Mujahid, a spokesman for the Kabul
Seven
students, three police officers, two university guards and one guard who worked
for a school for the blind, just next door to the university, were among the
dead, Mr. Mujahid said. Thirty others were wounded, he said. The bomber and
both gunmen were also killed.
Khawaja
Qamaruddin Sediqi, an adviser at the Afghan Ministry of Health, provided
slightly different figures, saying that 14 people had been killed and nearly 50
others wounded.
President
Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack as “barbaric” and described it as an act of
enmity against progress and development.
“Terrorists
and their sponsors should know that the people and government of Afghanistan
By
Thursday afternoon, no group had claimed responsibility, though a statement
from Mr. Ghani’s office suggested that suspicion had fallen on the Haqqani wing
of the Taliban, or some other Pakistan-based faction. The statement said that
initial intelligence suggested the attack had been orchestrated from Pakistan
For
much of the night, family members of the people trapped inside the university
gathered outside a security cordon, hoping for news of their loved ones. Some
students inside took to social media to ask for help, but they later fell
silent — possibly for safety reasons, to avoid alerting the gunmen to their
locations.
Afghan
special forces cut off the area’s electricity and began evacuating hundreds of
students, moving slowly in an attempt to avoid civilian casualties, said Sediq
Sediqqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. The siege was declared over
shortly before 5 a.m.
on Thursday.
Established
in 2006, the American University Afghanistan Kabul Afghanistan
Among
the dead was Naqib Ahmad Khpulwak, a young lecturer in the university’s law
department, who had recently completed a master’s degree in the United States
“Your
master’s degree is still lying in my pile of papers — you told me to get it
stamped and approved,” one of his friends in the United States
Some
of the people who had been trapped inside the university described a 10-hour
ordeal, much of it spent waiting for death in complete darkness.
Abdullah
Frotan, a student who was trapped until the very end of the siege, said he had
been in a third-floor classroom when the initial explosion occurred. About 10
students in his class tried to make it to the first floor to escape, but the
gunmen were already inside the building, so they rushed back to the third floor
and tried to hide in a classroom.
“We
were lying like dead bodies on the ground in the rear of the class, and we put
all the chairs in front of us, and we hid behind the chairs,” Mr. Frotan said. “They
fired at us from the corridor, and they searched the class with a flashlight
from the corridor, but it was too dark, and I think they did not see us or they
thought we were dead.”
Two
of his classmates were wounded, one in the back and one in the leg, Mr. Frotan
said. They held their hands over their mouths to stifle cries of pain that
could alert the attackers.
“One
of our classmates did not come back with us to the third floor. He was killed; we
learned this later,” Mr. Frotan said.
In
a separate attack Thursday morning in the northern province Balkh
The
target of the explosion was the lawmaker Asadullah Sharifi, who escaped
uninjured, but all the victims were civilians, said Munir Ahmad Farhad, a
spokesman for the governor of Balkh Province
Zahra
Nader contributed reporting.