An attack at the campus of American University of Afghanistan in Kabul has ended in the early hours of Thursday morning with 12 people, including seven students, dead, a police spokesman has said.
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The attack started yesterday evening local time, according to Reuters, with a vehicle bomb followed by gunfire in the campus.
Government special forces surrounded the walled compound, the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military advisers were coordinating the operation during the night.
Islamist militant groups, mainly the Afghan Taliban and a local offshoot of Islamic State, have claimed a string of recent bomb attacks aimed at destabilizing the country and toppling the Western-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani.
According to officials, the American university was opened in 2006, has more than 1,700 students.
The university was closed on Thursday and it’s not clear when it will reopen, the AP reports.
The dead included seven students, three police officers and two security guards, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi.
The Taliban have also closed in on Kunduz – the northern city they briefly seized past year in their biggest military victory so far – leaving Afghan forces stretched on multiple fronts.
Fifteen students were with Hossaini, the Associated Press photographer who studies political science at the university, when they first heard the explosion on the southern side of the institution’s campus.
It wasn’t immediately known who is responsible for the attack.
Only two weeks ago, two of the university’s foreign professors – a USA national and an Australian – were kidnapped at gunpoint.
It is the second time this month that the university or its staff have been targeted. Evening classes were just getting underway at the time, and students had started arriving as she was leaving, she said.
It is unclear how many attackers were involved.
About 1700 students are enrolled; many are adults who study part-time and also have jobs.
A wounded man lies inside an ambulance following an attack at American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, Afghanistan August 24, 2016.
The gunmen detonated explosives and fired guns, witnesses said, causing some students and faculty to flee.
Although no group or individual has claimed of responsibility for the deadly attack, officials have put finger at the enemies of Afghanistan, a reference to the Taliban.
The growing number of students attending university, especially women, is widely hailed as one of the biggest successes in Afghanistan since the US -led invasion in 2001 toppled the Taliban regime.
He remembered that moment when he and his colleagues understood they could not escape and tried to put up a defence by pushing chairs and desks against the door of the classroom where they were, ABC News said.
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“My brother-in-law’s daughter, a student, has disappeared”, an anxious woman told AFP outside the university. The whereabouts of the abductees remains unknown.
