The bombing attack in a residential area of Kabul killed over 10 people and wounded more than 200, in one of the most devastating attacks on the capital since the insurgency began in 2001.
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A barrage of deadly suicide attacks killed at least 40 people and wounded hundreds more in Kabul on Friday, ending a two-month lull in major terrorist strikes in the capital, according to Afghan officials.
The attack was followed nearly two hours after a suicide bomber detonated his explosives among the recruits of the Afghan police in Kabul police academy.
One service member and eight Afghan security guards were killed in the attack on the base, which is known as Camp Integrity, according to a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the company that employed the guards.
The Taliban said they were also behind the academy attack in which a person dressed in police uniform mingled with cadets returning from their weekend break.
Master Sgt. Peter A. McKenna Jr., 35, of Bristol, Rhode Island, died Friday when his post near the airport in Kabul was attacked, the Department of Defense reported.
Kabul has frequently been targeted by the Taliban and other insurgent groups seeking to destabilize the fragile government of President Ashraf Ghani although the scale of the latest attacks was unusually large. The 1 a.m. blast flattened an entire city block and also wounded 240 people, officials said.
On Saturday, in a his first audio message as leader of the group, Mansoor called for the Taliban to unite as “division in our ranks will only please our enemies”, he said.
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Toner said the attacks demonstrated the Taliban’s “complete disregard for the lives of innocent Afghans”. Another official told CNN’s Barbara Starr that almost 20 people of varying nationalities were wounded. Another police official confirmed that toll while a third senior security source said 25 cadets were killed.
Ghani threatened a rapid and forceful response to the bombing, saying it was aimed at diverting public attention from the Taliban’s leadership struggle. Most of the injured endured minor wounds, a significant number of them brought about by broken glass.
The radical Islamist insurgents claimed duty for each the police academy assault and the battle on the D.R. special forces base, although not for the truck bomb.
The statistics are a grim indicator of rising violence as the Taliban’s attacks spread north from their traditional southern and eastern strongholds.
“Those responsible for suicide and complex attacks in civilian-populated areas can no longer shrug off the disproportionate harm to the civilian population they cause”, said Nicholas Haysom, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. Effectively, the peace process is paused while the leadership contest is resolved one way or the other. Other contenders for the leadership might not be so open to a dialogue with the Afghan government, possibly believing that apparent success on the battlefield this year puts victory within sight.
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Police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi said the pre-dawn truck bomb was near a defence ministry compound, but that all of the victims were civilians, including women and children.
