Senior Taliban commander killed in Daesh attack

The Taliban spent 20 years waging an insurgency against the ousted US-backed government before seizing control of Kabul in August.

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 rivals, Daesh.

Several people were killed and wounded in Tuesday’s attack on Kabul’s main military hospital, according to a health ministry official.

Hamdullah Mokhlis, a member of the hardline Haqqani network and an officer in the Badri Corps special forces, is the most senior figure to have been killed since the Taliban seized Kabul.

“When he got the information that Sardar Daud Khan Hospital was under attack, Maulvi Hamdullah (Mokhlis), the commander of the Kabul corps, immediately rushed to the scene,” the Taliban media official said.

“We tried to stop him but he laughed. Later we found out that he was martyred in the face-to-face fight at the hospital,” he added.

The attack began with a suicide bomber detonating his explosives near the facility’s entrance before gunmen broke into the hospital grounds.

As part of the response, Kabul’s new rulers deployed their special forces to the roof of the building in a helicopter captured from Afghanistan’s former US-backed government.

In a statement released on its Telegram channels, Daesh announced that “five Islamic State group fighters carried out simultaneous coordinated attacks” on the site.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid has stated the attack was put down within 15 minutes thanks to the rapid intervention.

Daesh has claimed four mass casualty attacks since the Taliban takeover on August 15, including suicide bomb blasts targeting Shiite Muslim mosques.

Spokesman for the Taliban’s Political Office in Qatar, Ahmad Yasir, has also reported all Daesh militants that took part in the attack resulting in two blasts near Kabul’s hospital have been eliminated.

“The shootout in Kabul ended with the elimination of the militants,” he stated on Tuesday.