Military search for attackers.
At least one person was killed and 25 were injured in a terrorist attack targeting the American University of Afghanistan in western Kabul, on Wednesday evening, reported Fox News.
Hedayatullah Stanikzai, an official with the Ministry of Public Health, said that the man who was killed was a guard employed by the university and the wounded include a foreign teacher.
Security teams have covered the area and rescue operations are going on.
Reuters reported that dozens of students and foreign staff were trapped inside classrooms. The injured have been taken to hospitals in ambulances.
The military has started a search for the attackers.
The assailants detonated explosives on the campus and opened fire afterward. According to media reports, there were two assailants who entered the campus after hitting the main gate with a car.
Students and teachers started screaming and running after the explosion and gunfire took place.
“It was very dark, (and) everyone was running. Everyone started screaming. (It) was the scariest moment in my life. I was just thinking about my son and daughter who are in (the United States),” Ahmad Samin, a teacher, told CNN.
Associated Press photographer Massoud Hossaini, who was in a classroom told Fox News that he saw a man who shot at him.
“I went to the window to see what was going on, and I saw a person in normal clothes outside. He shot at me and shattered the glass,” he said. He fell on the glass and cut his hands.
Hossaini managed to escape from the campus through an emergency door along with nine students.
Many students took shelter inside classrooms pushing chairs and desks against the door and staying on the floor.
“As we were running I saw someone lying on the ground face down, they looked like they had been shot in the back,” Hossaini told Fox News.
Though the number of American students studying at the university is much lesser, its staff includes many American citizens. The US Embassy in Kabul is collecting the details of the US staff.
Many students jumped from the second floor of the campus building to escape, but many of them broke their legs and hurt their head.
According to the Fox News report, the U.S. military is assisting the Afghan forces.
“These advisors are not taking a combat role, but advising their Afghan counterparts,” U.S. Army Colonel Michael T. Lawhorn told Fox News.
No militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Opened in 2006, the American University of Afghanistan is the only private, non-profit, co-ed university in the country. It offers several arts courses modeled on the US system and has about 1700 full-time and part-time students.
On August 7, two professors from the university, Kevin King, an American, and Timothy Weeks from Australia, were kidnapped at gunpoint in Kabul.