Kabul's day of terror
• Suicide bombings and gun battles engulf Afghan capital
• Shopping centre, cinema, bank and hotel targeted
Kabul hit by series of co-ordinated attacks
Link to this video The daily business of government was already in full swing by the time a man wearing a white shalwar kameez walked towards the front gate of
Afghanistan's central bank. Close by, deep inside his presidential palace, Hamid Karzai was finally getting round to swearing-in members of his new cabinet. It was just before 10 o'clock in the morning.
The guards at the central bank were already on high alert after recent intelligence warnings suggested a spectacular attack was on the cards and the man in white was behaving extremely suspiciously.
Taliban attacks in Kabul
Link to this audio "He was about 10 metres away from the main gate of the bank and the guards told him to stop," said Ahmad, a plain clothes member of the elite counterterror group Task Force 24, who was at the bank at the time. "But he didn't say anything or explain himself, he just carried on walking and tried to climb over the barrier."
Convinced they were being approached by a suicide bomber, the guards opened fire. The man's device detonated, causing a huge explosion that narrowly missed killing a group of British bodyguards, sheltered from the main force of the blast by another vehicle.
That was the first assault of the day. efore too long a fire, triggered by two bombers detonating their explosive vests, ripped through a nearby shopping centre, sending a plume of smoke high into the sky above central Kabul.
And minutes after the foiled central bank attack, explosions and gunfire could be heard from the nearby ministry of justice, on the other side of Pashtunistan Square, as the insurgents mounted another attack. Either from there or from a nearby vantage point the attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades into the ministry of finance, which hit reinforced shelters in its grounds where government security forces had taken cover.
After the first blast all that was left of the attacker, says Ahmad, were his two legs lying on the ground. Attached to them were a pair of size 41 shoes that in Ahmad's view were clearly of a "Pakistani" design, hinting at the already widely held view among the country's counter-terrorism chiefs that this was a plot that originated from outside Afghanistan's borders.
Hanif Atmar, the softly spoken interior minister, added to that sentiment , saying: "There is no school for training suicide bombers in this *country" – although there are plenty of radical madrasas that do so in the borderlands of Pakistan.
And, in his view, it was the quick-*wittedness of his security forces at the central bank that forced the team of insurgent gunmen and suicide bombers to leave and instead run amok in the nearby shopping centre, a far softer target.
"Our officer who was killed, he was the one who detected the first suicide bomber trying to enter the bank," Atmar said. "He detected him and before [the bomber] was able to get to the front gate he was killed. That detection forced the others to go and choose the shopping centre."
At a joint briefing with Afghanistan's other security chiefs Atmar said the day also saw attacks on the former Bamiyan hotel, an explosion near a mosque and fighting in the Ariana cinema. He said an intelligence agent was killed, two policemen, two civilians and a child. He said 71 other people were wounded, including 35 civilians and that most of the injuries were caused by insurgents triggering hand grenades.
For the hundreds of civil servants and international consultants trapped in the government buildings there was little to do but listen to the five hours of explosions and raging gun battles and hope that their offices had not been penetrated by insurgents. Security officials told them to lie on the floor and not look out of their windows.
Others did not have the advantage of such sensible advice. Khalid Stanekzai, 23, the boss of Afghanistan's main Nokia dealership, stood at his office window high up in the recently built Gulbahar shopping centre. He was captivated by the scene below him.
"I had never seen the face of the war before, but I could see it all from there," he said. "I took my phone and got a picture because it was amazing to me. I filmed it all on my mobile phone."
At around 11 o'clock, amid all the pandemonium, he noticed an ambulance approach his building. On the ground the security forces were suspicious after the driver failed to respond to their challenges. One of them was close enough to see that he had some sort of a detonation device strapped to his right leg, and yelled to his colleagues to dive for cover.
But Stanekzai did not hear the warning as the ambulance blew apart on the street below him, leaving behind a deep crater in the road.
"The soldiers were running and they were shooting at the ambulance and then it made a very big explosion," – the last thing he remembered as shrapnel and glass tore into his face.
Meanwhile the police force was rapidly shutting down the city, sending thousands of people streaming away from the epicentre of violence as shopkeepers *rapidly boarded up their houses.
In Shar-e-Naw, a considerable distance from the fighting, cars turned back on themselves into the one-way system. People who tried to walk towards the fighting, including a few foreign photographers, had pistols waved angrily in their faces.
After it became clear that the attackers were using police uniforms, the Afghanistan National Army and the National Directorate of Security ordered the withdrawal of police from the centre of town and took over the counter-offensive, according to western officials.
They manned positions at the top of the ministry of finance from where they opened fire on the insurgents in the ministry of justice, across Pashtunistan Square.
It was only a matter of time before all the attackers were dead and the situation was brought back under control, leaving relatives to wait anxiously outside the city's hospitals for the wounded, many complaining bitterly about the government's failure to secure the capital.
By early evening Stanekzai was finally discharged from Kabul's Italian-run emergency hospital with 52 stitches in his left cheek and six in his right hand where he had been clutching his mobile phone in front of him.
He left for home sitting bare-chested in the back of a friend's car – the shalwar kameez that he had been wearing earlier reduced to a torn and crumpled mass of thickly bloodstained cloth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...an-afghanistan
Talibans Launch a Major Attack in Kabul
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Simon Cashmere
do they think they are going to go after this little battle. Sure they might take some soldiers with them, blow some buildings up, maybe even shoot a few civilians, but thats 20 fighters dead.
