Explosion rocks Afghan capital and leaves homes damaged ad reports of civilian casualties

By Roland Oliphant and Suddaf Chaudry KABUL | Telegraph

As dusk fell over Kabul on Sunday afternoon, a boom of an explosion rolled across the city from the direction of the airport.  

Soon a pall of thick black smoke was climbing into the sky, and residents were once again calling one another to check who had seen what, whether anyone had been hurt, and where exactly the blast had taken place.

The city was already on edge following last Thursday's horrific bombing of the crowds trying to get on US and Nato-led evacuation flights from Hamid Karzai International Airport. 

The rumours quickly began to circulate: Terrorists had hit the airport again. A rocket had blown up a house. A child had been killed. Only the last of those later proved, tragically, to be true.

The Taliban and the United States quickly issued near-simultaneous statements that were, for once, almost entirely in agreement.

The United States said it destroyed an explosive-laden vehicle with an air strike in Kabul, hours after President Joe Biden warned of another terror attack in the capital as a massive airlift of tens of thousands of Afghans entered its last days.

A Taliban spokesman confirmed the incident, saying a car bomb destined for the airport had been destroyed - and that a possible second strike had hit a nearby house.

It later emerged that a drone flying out of an American base in the United Arab Emirates had fired at a parked vehicle in a street about three kilometres from Kabul airport.

“US military forces conducted a self-defence unmanned over the horizon airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul, eliminating an imminent IS-K threat to Hamad Karzai International Airport,” a US defence official said. “We are confident we successfully hit the target.”

The enormous explosion had apparently been caused by the secondary detonation of what the US statement called "a substantial amount of explosive material" - in other words, the car bomb that IS-K terrorists had planned to drive into the airport crowd.

Photographs from the scene showed the mangled remains of a mulberry-coloured car parked in a small courtyard close to residential houses.

The vehicle had been charred black and white by the heat of the blast and its bonnet popped open like a clown car. The nearby houses bore shrapnel marks and had their windows were blown in.

American spokesmen said the strike was a success that had killed two would-be bombers, and claimed to have no information about civilian casualties. 

But in the neighbourhood north of the airport where the strike took place, confused locals insisted bystanders had been killed.

Some angry residents of the neighbourhood north of Kabul airport where the strike took place said that a child and two adults were killed, while others said that three people were injured. One man who did not want to be named said that the strike hit a car parked in front of a house.

An Afghan official later said that three children were killed in the strike.

And late on Sunday the US said it is investigating whether civilians may have been killed in the airstrike after CNN reported that nine members of a family, including six children, were killed.

Critics have accused the US military of a cavalier attitude to collateral damage from drone strikes throughout the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

Hellfire R9X missile

The Pentagon has let it be known that its previous strike on an IS-K vehicle on Saturday used a new bomb armed with swords rather than a warhead to prevent civilian casualties.

If that high-tech kit was used this time, it apparently did not work as intended.

But if successful, the suicide attack would almost certainly have caused horrific carnage, after last week's suicide blast killed 13 US troops and more than 150 Afghan civilians trying to flee the country.

Just hours earlier, US officials had urged people to leave the airport because of the danger of a second attack.

But hundreds of people continued to clog the the streets around the last operating entrance to the airport on Sunday, hoping against hope to secure a seat on the very last flights out.

Even after the blast in the evening, roads around the airport were so badly blocked it took reporters an unusually long time to make what would normally be a ten-minute drive to investigate the explosion.

US officials indicated they wanted the civilian airlift finished by the end of Sunday.

The tempo of aircraft arriving and taking off has slowed considerably from the 45-minute intervals at the peak of the operation.

One US military source said the effort to withdraw the remaining soldiers, contractors and diplomatic staff who have operated the airport for the past two weeks will be largely complete by Tuesday night.