The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
A Taleban suicide squad brought Kabul to a standstill yesterday after seizing control of one of the city’s tallest buildings and firing rocket-propelled grenades into the American Embassy, Nato’s headquarters and swaths of the diplomatic district.
Helicopter gunships, British special forces and Macedonian snipers were all drafted in to fight off the attackers, who also carried machineguns to the top of the 12-storey building, which is still under construction, and sprayed the city with bullets.
It was the most dramatic in a series of attacks which left at least seven people dead and forced the British Embassy and President Karzai’s palace into lockdown.
Last night the battle was still raging. Witnesses said that one attacker appeared to detonate a suicide vest on the 7th floor shortly before 11pm. At least two more insurgents were thought to be on the roof. Residents reported sporadic bursts of small-arms fire throughout the evening.
Three of the busiest roads in the capital were sealed off for most of the day and diplomats cowered in shelters. Afghan police blasted the concrete tower with heavy machinegun fire before snipers on Nato helicopters tried to pick off the attackers in a series of low fly pasts, but to no avail.
From the balcony of a nearby apartment block I watched as the insurgents survived barrage after barrage which lit up the gloom of the building. Trails of smoke from larger weapons were visible on at least three occasions.
At least three civilians, one of them a woman, were wounded near the American embassy and flown to hospital, a military official said. A spokeswoman for the US embassy said that four Afghans were wounded during the attack but none had life-threating injuries. “They included three Afghan visa applicants and one local contract guard,” she said.
The British Embassy said that it was not aware of any British citizens being caught up in the attack.
At one point soldiers at Nato’s International Security Assistance Force headquarters barricaded themselves into their dining room, using canteen chairs to block the doors, amid fears that the perimeter had been breached. In separate attacks, three suicide bombers targeted Afghan police stations in the west of the city.
The attack on the tower in Wazir Akbar Khan, where most of the foreign embassies are located, began at about the same time and was carried out by at least four armed men. At least one policeman at a checkpoint — part of a so-called “ring of steel” — was killed.
The building, left unfinished for years, towers over the headquarters of the Afghan secret police and lies fewer than 400 metres (1,300ft) from the edge of Nato’s nerve centre, which adjoins the presidential palace.
By mid-afternoon a thick plume of white smoke was visible above the police compound. A rocket landed on the roof of a TV station and an Afghan journalist was shot in the leg.
Two Afghan attack helicopters, Russian-made Mi35s, circled over the scene at about 4.30pm, with one delivering a short salvo of cannon fire, but still the insurgents fought back. It was not until 6pm that Afghan commandos began storming the building.
The attacks come just 48 hours after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, claimed to have reversed the insurgent momentum. The Taleban claimed responsibility for the attack, although it had the hallmarks of the Haqqani network, a separate, more sophisticated insurgent organisation which Nato has blamed for similar assaults on the InterContinental hotel and the British Council compound last month.
President Karzai and the Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen both insisted that the attack would not derail plans to hand responsibility to Afghan forces. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said that it would not deter the American mission. “We will take all necessary steps, not only to ensure the safety of our people, but to secure the area and to ensure that those who perpetrated this attack are dealt with,” she said.
