Mon 03 August 2020:
At least 21 people have been killed in ongoing fighting between Afghan security forces and gunmen who raided a jail overnight.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group’s affiliate in Afghanistan, known as IS in Khorasan province, claimed responsibility for the attack. The affiliate is headquartered in Nangarhar province.
Among the dead were prisoners as well as civilians, prison guards and Afghan security personnel, Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the governor of Nangarhar province, told Al Jazeera.
Another 43 people have been wounded in the attack in the provincal capital Jalalabad that began late on Sunday when an ISIL suicide bomber slammed his explosive-laden vehicle into the prison entrance.
Daesh-claimed assault on a prison in Jalalabad, Afghanistan leaves at least 24 people dead pic.twitter.com/MaDy6juaBs
— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) August 3, 2020
More assailants opened fire. Three attackers have been killed so far as the battle continued on Monday, Khogyani said.
Afghan officials said the death toll could rise.
There were also reports of dozens of prisoners escaping from the facility. Nangarhar police spokesman Tareq Aziz told AFP news agency that about 100 inmates tried to escape but many of them were captured by security forces.
But Ahmad Ali Hazarat, the head of Nangarhar provincial council, told AFP that a “large number” of them had managed to escape.
The prison houses about 1,500 inmates, of which several hundred are believed to belong to the ISIL group affiliate in Afghanistan.
Earlier, a Taliban spokesperson said on Twitter that the group was not involved in the attack, which came on the final day of a rare truce between it and the Afghan government to mark the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday.
The prison attack came a day after the Afghan intelligence agency said a senior ISIL commander was killed by Afghan special forces near Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.
Last week, a UN report said almost 1,300 civilians, including hundreds of children, were killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of the year, a 13 percent drop compared with the same period in 2019.
The report credited the drop in part to the reduction of operations by international forces in support of Afghan government forces and also to a decrease in the number of attacks by ISIL.
