Senior Taliban commander among dead in hospital attack

Kabul: A Taliban military commander in Kabul was among the fighters killed when his men responded to an Islamic State attack on a hospital, officials said Wednesday.

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 the capital.

"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.

At least 19 people were killed on Tuesday in the attack claimed by the Taliban's hardline rivals, the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), on Kabul's main military hospital.

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.

Witnesses described to AFP a scene of terror, as patients and doctors tried to lock themselves in upper-storey rooms and gunfire erupted.

In a statement released on its Telegram channels, IS-K said that "five Islamic State group fighters carried out simultaneous coordinated attacks" on the site.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid played down the death toll, and said the attack was put down within 15 minutes thanks to the rapid intervention.