Attackers Wearing Army Uniforms Make Deadly Assault on Bank in Afghanistan
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: February 19, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — As Afghan soldiers and police officers lined up on Saturday to get their monthly salaries at a bank in downtown Jalalabad, they became targets for seven heavily armed attackers in Army uniforms who had joined them, Afghan officials said.
Parwiz/Reuters
Smoke after an explosion during an attack Saturday by gunmen on a Jalalabad bank.
In a chaotic scene, the attackers, all wearing explosive vests, started a gun battle, and several rushed into the bank, starting a siege there. The fighting ended three hours later, leaving 18 people dead and about 70 wounded, the governor of Nangarhar Province said. The main hospital, overwhelmed, put out a radio call for all doctors in the area to report to the emergency room, and officials imposed a curfew across Jalalabad, which is Nangarhar’s capital and the biggest city in eastern Afghanistan.
“There were seven suicide bombers dressed in A.N.A. uniform,” said the governor, Gul Agha Shirzai. “Five of the bombers were killed in the firefight with security forces, and two blew themselves up.”
This was the fourth carefully planned suicide attack in just a little over three weeks and the third to hit a major Afghan city. The other two were in a supermarket frequented by foreigners in Kabul on Jan. 28, and in Kandahar on Feb. 12. Another suicide attack occurred on the edge of the capital of Khost Province. In all, 57 people have been killed in the attacks.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the latest attack. “We inflicted heavy casualties on the security forces of the puppet government,” a Taliban spokesman said.
The frequency of the attacks suggests that the insurgents are staging a carefully calculated campaign to undermine the government and persuade the public that neither the government nor a 150,000-person NATO military force can keep them safe.
“The Taliban would like to prove to the people that the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police are just a rumor,” said Mirwais Yasini, a senior member of Parliament from Jalalabad, who rushed to the city from Kabul when he got word that the attack was under way. “The security forces are not established yet, and the Taliban, in order to show to the world and the Afghans, that they have, they can, infiltrate the security cordons and that there are intelligence blunders and that they can do what they want, systematically are breaching the security — in Kandahar, Kabul, Jalalabad.”
“It’s a failure on the part of the government,” he said.
President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned the attack. “The terrorists attacked the innocent people with brutality, people who were there for business and to collect salaries or attend to other daily affairs,” he said in a statement. “This attack once more shows the anti-Islamic and cowardly actions of the terrorists, who don’t want Afghan people to carry on their peaceful lives.”
The insurgents’ decision to use Jalalabad as a target was a surprise. The city, which is a business hub benefiting from the robust trade with Pakistan that flows in from the nearby border crossing at Torkham, has been mostly calm for more than a year. Nangarhar Province has long been considered a transit point for insurgents entering from Pakistan but not a target itself.
While there are fierce political rivalries in the city, and several of the leading politicians travel with convoys of armed gunman, the Taliban have kept a low profile there — until recently.
On Feb. 8, just a bit beyond the city limits, thousands of people gathered for the funeral of Awal Gul, a detainee at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba who died there while exercising. People who attended the ceremony said that messages were read from a prominent local Taliban leader and that the crowd chanted anti-American slogans and vowed revenge.
“The people and Afghan security forces didn’t expect that the Taliban would attack them,” said Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mamozai, who until recently commanded the eastern region’s border police, based near Jalalabad.
“The Taliban were mostly attacking foreign forces in Jalalabad; nobody thought they would attack a soft target like a bank branch.”
Witnesses described a terrifying and confusing scene. When the attack began, at least one of the attackers rushed to the roof of the building that houses the bank, a branch of the central Kabul Bank. The gunmen started firing randomly as if to announce the Taliban’s presence. Several other attackers — it is not clear if it was all of them — rushed into the bank.
The security forces at the scene — with the Afghan Army, the police and the border police, later joined by American troops — began firing into the building. The shots shattered many of the building’s windows and the splintering glass was one of the main causes of injury to those inside, the police said.
The gunfire reverberated throughout the city center, which quickly emptied as merchants rushed to lock their shops, pull down their gates and flee the area.
Near the end of the shooting, when many thought it was over, a wounded attacker was mistakenly taken for an Afghan Army soldier because of the uniform he wore. Afghan security forces put him on a stretcher and were hurrying toward an ambulance when the man detonated his explosives, said a senior Afghan official and several policemen who were at the scene.
Soon after the attack began and for hours after it was over, Afghan security forces were spread across the city, checking cars at every major intersection, and the government imposed a citywide curfew. Local radio broadcast pleas for people to donate their blood for the wounded.
Also Saturday, A NATO service member was killed in southern Afghanistan, according to a NATO statement.
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