KABUL: A 25-hour gun and bomb siege near the Indian consulate in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif ended late on Monday after all the attackers were killed.

“The clearance operation is over and all the terrorists have all been killed,” provincial police chief Sayed Kamal Sadat said.

Government spokesman Shir Jan Durrani said three armed assailants had been killed after they mounted an attack on the diplomatic mission from a nearby building late on Sunday.

“Our search operation is still going on inside the building,” he said, adding that the fighting left one policeman dead and 11 others injured.

Earlier in the day, gunfights and grenade explosions echoed as commandos battled to flush out militants holed up in a building near the consulate, with Balkh Governor Atta Mohammad Noor overseeing the operation.

Two explosions hit Kabul; compound for foreign contractors attacked

“The attackers are enemies of Afghanistan who do not want peace,” he told reporters. “We will suppress them as soon as possible.”

But security officials said they were proceeding cautiously in the residential area to limit civilian casualties.

An Indian official, who was hunkered down in a secure area within the diplomatic enclave, said all consulate employees were safe.

“We are being attacked,” the official told AFP by telephone from inside the heavily guarded compound soon after the fighting erupted late Sunday evening.

Police said some consulate employees had been evacuated.

Afghan special forces fought with insurgents barricaded in a house near the consulate.

As the battle stretched into the afternoon, soldiers entered the building, a large structure formerly used as an office by the United States development agency USAID, where between four and six attackers had locked themselves inside a safe room.

The attack began after gunmen tried unsuccessfully to break into the consulate, taking advantage of the fact that many people were watching the final of a football championship between Afghanistan and India.

After a heavy exchange of fire that went on until well into the night, security forces suspended operations before resuming in the morning, firing rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns at the building.

Gunfire rang out as a helicopters circled overhead in a residential area of the city.

Meanwhile, a car bomb in Kabul appeared to target a compound for foreign contractors near the airport in the evening, close to where a suicide bomber struck earlier in the day.

The interior ministry said four people were wounded in the second bombing and only the attacker died in the first, that took place close to a police checkpoint near the airport.

According to the US defence department, the attack on a compound housing civilian contractors in Afghanistan on Monday wounded several people, but did not cause any military casualties.

Pentagon spokesman Capt Jeff Davis said attackers had breached a wall at the compound, known as Camp Sullivan, near the Kabul airport.

He said Nato coalition troops were helping carry out medical evacuations.

“There are ongoing operations that we are supporting to medivac people who might need to be medivacked out of there.”

The US military in Afghanistan did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.

Published in Dawn, January 5th, 2016