Americans among Kabul hotel’s dead
KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. said Tuesday that Americans were among the dead and wounded in the Taliban’s 13-hour attack of an upscale hotel in the capital, Kabul, over the weekend that left 22 dead.
No exact figures were immediately available for either the U.S. fatalities or injuries. The dead included 14 foreigners, Afghan officials said. Eleven of the 14 foreigners had been previously identified as working for the private Afghan airline KamAir.
“We offer our deepest condolences to the families and friends of those who were killed and wish for the speedy recovery of those wounded,” the State Department said. “Out of respect for the families of the deceased, we have no further comment.”
Afghan officials said it appeared that at least three people with U.S. citizenship — all of them either dual citizens or with family roots in Afghanistan — had lost their lives.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry identified one of the dead as Abdullah Waheed Poyan, an Afghan diplomat. Relatives said he had lived in the United States for at least a decade and held a U.S. passport.
The attack at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel ended Sunday with Afghan security forces saying they had killed the last of six Taliban militants who stormed the hotel in suicide vests late the previous night, looking for foreigners and Afghan officials to kill. More than 150 people were rescued or managed to escape, including 41 foreigners. Some hid in bathtubs or under mattresses as the attackers roamed the hotel’s hallways killing people.
Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said an investigation was underway to find out how the attackers got into the building so easily. Najib Danish, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said Tuesday that security forces also defused a vehicle full of explosives near the hotel after the attack ended.
The American deaths were the latest reminder of the continuing toll paid by the United States in Afghanistan, where local forces have struggled to fight the Taliban since the U.S. and NATO formally ended their combat mission in 2014.
President Donald Trump has pursued a plan that involves sending thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan and envisions shifting away from a “time-based” approach to one that more explicitly links U.S. assistance to concrete results from the Afghan government.
It was unclear how seriously the injured Americans were wounded. In addition to the Americans killed in the attack, six Ukrainians, two Venezuelan pilots for KamAir and a citizen of Kazakhstan and a citizen of Germany were also killed, officials have said.
Ahmad Shakib Mostaghni, a spokesman for the Afghan Foreign Ministry, said paperwork for 10 of the foreigners was completed and that their bodies would be flown to their home countries soon.
“The four remaining are Americans and German,” Mostaghni said. “Their paperwork is not ready, and no one has reached our ministry for assistance. All the bodies are at the morgue.”
Information for this article was contributed by Josh Lederman and Rahim Faiez of The Associated Press; and by Mujib Mashal and Jawad Sukhanyar of The New York Times.