The ministry said 36 people were wounded, including nine police officers.
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The attack began on Wednesday evening with a suicide auto bomb attack at the university entrance that opened a hole in the walls of the compound, enabling “terrorists” to enter the campus in Kabul, the newswire quoted an interior ministry spokesman as saying. He was “a very strong member of the foreign language education community” and a ” leader in the graduate student organization”, she said.
The gunmen got into the building despite armed guards and watchtowers.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack on the university, which has some 1,700 students.
“Two attackers were gunned down”, Fraidoon Obaidi, chief of Kabul police’s Criminal Investigation Department, told AFP.
The attack was condemned by Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah.
The American university, which first opened its doors to students in 2005, is a non-profit private university chartered in the US.
Three women were among the wounded.
“I finished my class and was about to leave when I heard a few gunshots and a huge explosion, followed by more gunfire”, student Ahmad Mukhtar told Reuters.
Massoud Hossaini, 34, said he was shot at by a person wearing “normal clothes” while he tried to see what was going outside through a window. “He shot at me and shattered the glass”, he said.
Terrified students recounted barricading themselves in classrooms or jumping from the second floor in order to escape.
Hossaini said at least two grenades were thrown into the room, wounding several classmates.
After the kidnappings, numerous students interviewed said that they felt safe on the highly secure campus and were accustomed to living amid violence and conflict but that they anxious that foreign instructors would be deterred from returning or taking new positions.
Afghan security forces inspect the site after an attack on the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 25, 2016.
A Defense Department official in Washington said a small contingent from the USA military advisory mission based in Kabul was “assisting” and “advising” Afghan forces as they responded to the chaos.
Witnesses at the scene said gunfire had since stopped, and special forces had made their way into the compound.
Earlier this month, two teachers working at the university-an American and an Australian-were kidnapped while on their way from their guesthouse to the campus. Their abductors were men dressed in Afghan military uniforms, officials said at the time. Their whereabouts are still unknown.
“These advisers are not taking a combat role, but advising their Afghan counterparts”, said U.S. Army Col. Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have been fighting to overthrow the Kabul government for 15 years, and regard foreign civilians as legitimate targets.
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The National Security Council issued this statement on Wednesday: “The United States condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist attack today on the American University of Afghanistan”.
