STUDENTS TELL OF KABUL TERROR ATTACK
Students recount attack on Afghan university
KABUL • Mohammed Naser heard the bomb go off and ran to his second-floor classroom window, just in time to see the cinder block garden wall blow apart. The lights went out and students rushed for the stairway, but someone said gunmen had entered the first floor.
“We were trapped. Girls were screaming in the next classroom. I could feel the fear,” Naser, 21, a business student at the American University of Afghanistan, said Thursday morning, hours after militants bombed and stormed the campus Wednesday evening, leaving at least 13 people dead and 45 wounded.
The attackers detonated a truck bomb at a school for the blind next door to the prestigious U.S.-run university while evening classes were in session. A small squad of gunmen rushed into the compound, battling police and other security forces until the pre-dawn hours. At least seven students died and hundreds were trapped for hours before the assailants were killed and the campus evacuated.
“They were trying to kick down our classroom door, so we pushed all the tables and chairs against it. Then students started jumping out the windows, and I did, too,” Naser recounted from his bed at the Emergency Hospital in the Afghan capital.
At the same time Naser and about 20 other students were huddled behind a pile of furniture in their economics class, a police special forces officer named Faraidoon Nizami, 25, was trying to fight his way up to their location.
“I saw one guy wearing a commando uniform, and I shot him,” Nizami said Thursday. As he and his teammates started up the stairs, another militant threw a grenade down and injured one of them. Nizami said he threw a grenade back and saw the second attacker collapse, but he, too, was wounded.
Naser and Nizami ended up in the same cramped hospital ward Thursday, along with half a dozen other wounded students and police. Naser, who had landed on a cement patio when he jumped, broke his right arm and shattered his left hip, but crawled to a basement library and passed out. When he woke up, police special forces were carrying him to an ambulance.
“This was a political attack,” he said. “They are trying to stop education in Afghanistan, and our university is the only one with international standards. It is a horrible pattern.”
Two foreign professors including one American were kidnapped near the university Aug. 7 and have not been heard from since.
Nizami, who was nursing a leg wound, said his injured teammate later died in a hospital and their unit commander was shot dead in the all-night gun battle. But he said he was glad most of the students had been rescued and proud that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had stopped by his hospital bed early Thursday.
“I lost two of my friends, but the president came here and said he appreciated what we had done,” said Nizami, who was a pharmacist
STUDENTS STARTED JUMPING OUT THE WINDOWS, AND I DID, TOO.
before joining the police. “Education is so important for our country. If people are educated, there would be no more war.”
Ghani issued a statement later Thursday calling the attack “a cowardly attempt to hinder progress and development in Afghanistan.” He said terrorist groups seek to obstruct the development of “values that Afghans believe in” to bring growth and prosperity but that such attacks will only strengthen the nation’s determination to “fight and eradicate terror.”
No group has claimed responsibility for the campus assault, but its combination of a powerful bomb followed by a commando-style ground assault was typical of previous attacks on foreign and government facilities in Kabul by Taliban insurgents.