No fewer than 19 people have been confirmed dead and 50 others wounded following an attack on a military hospital in Kabul on Tuesday.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that the attack is the latest assault to rock Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power.
The attack got began when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives near the entrance of the sprawling site.
Gunmen then broke into the hospital grounds, firing their weapons there, the Taliban said.
‘Nineteen dead bodies and about 50 wounded people have been taken to hospitals in Kabul,’ a health ministry official who asked not to be named told reporters.
The Taliban spent 20 years waging an insurgency against the ousted US-backed government.
Now they face the struggle of bringing stability to Afghanistan, which has been hit in recent weeks by a series of bloody assaults claimed by the Islamic State groupβs local chapter.
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Tuesdayβs attack has not yet been claimed by any group.
‘All the attackers are dead. The attack was initiated by a suicide bomber on a motorcycle who blew himself up at the entrance of the hospital,’ a Taliban official from the media team said.
‘Some attackers entered the hospital compound.’
Two explosions targeted the hospital area, he had earlier said in a statement.
‘I heard a big explosion coming from the first checkpoint. We were told to go to safe rooms. I also hear guns firing,’ a doctor at the Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan hospital in Kabul told reporters while the attack was being carried out.
The hospital, which treats wounded soldiers from both the Taliban and former Afghan security forces, was previously attacked in 2017, when gunmen disguised as medical personnel killed at least 30 people in an hours-long siege.
Although both IS and the Taliban are hardline Sunni Islamist militants, they differ on details of religion and strategy.
IS have claimed four mass casualty attacks since the Taliban takeover on August 15, including suicide bomb blasts targeting Shiite Muslim mosques. The group regards Shiite Muslims as heretics.
In the 2017 attack on the military hospital, militants went room to room killing people, switching to knives when they ran out of ammunition.
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