KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – One international service member was killed in an attack on a military base in the Afghan capital, a NATO official said Saturday. The nationality was not released.
The attack on Camp Integrity on Friday night and two massive bombings in the city earlier in the day call into question Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s ability to tamp down the violent insurgency that is roiling the country despite his administration’s focus on making peace with the Taliban. At least 36 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the attacks in Kabul on Friday.
NATO spokesman Col. Brian Tribus said that the attack on Camp Integrity, on Kabul’s outskirts, also left two insurgents dead, killed by coalition forces. Other details were not immediately released.
The attack on the camp followed within hours of a suicide attack on a police academy in Kabul that killed 20 people and wounded at least 24.
The Taliban claimed responsibility, in a statement on their website, for the attack in which a person dressed in police uniform mingled with cadets returning from their weekend break.
As they were lined up to re-enter the academy, the attacker detonated an explosives-packed vest, a security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
Earlier Friday, a truck bomb in a residential area of Kabul killed 15 people and wounded more than 200, in one of the most devastating attacks on the capital since the insurgency began in 2001. The blast flattened a city block and left a 10-meter (30-foot) crater in the ground.
The use of such huge quantities of explosives is rare in Kabul, though in recent weeks truck bombs have become more common in insurgent attacks elsewhere in the country.
The attacks on Friday follow a week of turmoil in the Taliban after the Afghan intelligence service announced that their leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead for more than two years.
After the Taliban confirmed Mullah Omar’s death, a leadership struggle engulfed the upper echelons of the group, which is holding meetings in the Pakistani city of Quetta in an effort to resolve the crisis.
There appears to be no easing in the intensity of the fighting between the Taliban and Afghan forces, which has caused almost 5,000 civilian casualties this year, according to a recent report by the United Nations.