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Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen barraged the diplomatic quarter and the Parliament in the Afghan capital for hours on Sunday and struck three eastern provinces as well, in a complex attack clearly designed to undermine confidence in NATO and Afghan military gains.
Though the overall confirmed death toll was low, with six victims initially reported across four provinces, they were among the most audacious coordinated terrorist attacks here in recent years. The multiple sieges ended in Kabul on Monday morning after nearly 18 hours, and silence fell on the city with roads in the bullet-strafed areas beginning to reopen. The last of the attacks to be resolved was the one on the Parliament, which ended at 7:30 a.m., according to a statement by the Afghan Interior Ministry. “The situation is normal,” the ministry said.
The attacks came near the peak of the American military troop “surge” in Afghanistan, some of it designed around ensuring the security of the capital. And they were an early test for the Afghan National Security Forces, who responded with only minimal help from NATO, Western military officials said.
“No one is underestimating the seriousness of today’s attacks,” Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander, said in a statement. “Each attack was meant to send a message: that legitimate governance and Afghan sovereignty are in peril. The A.N.S.F. response itself is proof enough of that folly.”
The assaults — at least three in Kabul, two in Nangarhar Province and one each in Paktia and Logar Provinces — began simultaneously at 1:45 p.m., and witnesses described nearly identical patterns of attack: light gunfire, followed by explosions and then protracted firefights with Afghan security forces, with the militants in several cases fighting from empty buildings or construction sites near their main targets.
Western officials said the attacks bore the hallmarks of the offshoot Haqqani network of the Taliban, which has focused on attacks against high-profile Afghan government and foreign targets. The network is based in Pakistan, a source of tension between the Pakistani government and the United States. The Haqqanis have become one focus of American military efforts, and the attacks on Sunday raised troubling questions about the state of intelligence on the supposedly weakened militants’ movements.
The Haqqani network was directly involved in one of the last major attacks in Kabul, an assault on the American Embassy in September, and that, too, involved militants raining down rocket and gunfire from an unfinished building nearby, suggesting a lasting security weakness within even the most secure districts of the capital.
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