Six Afghan civilians, including four children, were killed after a rocket was fired at the Kabul airport on Sunday where the US-led evacuation flights were continuing but failed to hit the target, a local source confirmed.
“The rocket struck a house in Khwaja Bughra, a populated residential area in Police District 15, killing two adults and four children,” Hajji Karim, a representative of the neighborhood in the municipality district, told reporters at the site.
The incident occurred roughly at 4:55 p.m. local time in the area, west of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, the Xinhua news agency reported.
On Thursday, a deadly suicide bomb blast and gun firing claimed by ISIS-K, a local affiliate of the Islamic State group, killed 170 Afghans and 13 US troops at an eastern gate of the Kabul airport and injured nearly 200 others.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Taliban officials and public health authorities have not commented on the blast so far. The attack came after a US drone was hovering over the city, witnesses said.
This comes hours after US president Joe Biden said that US military commanders have intelligence inputs of another terrorist attack at the Hamid Karzai International Airport within the next 24 to 36 hours. Reports said Sunday’s blast was heard from the Gulai area of Khajeh Baghra in the 11th security district. Unconfirmed reports also claimed that the blast might have been caused by a rocket hitting a residential house in the area.
.Photos and videos of large plumes of smoke rising from a heavily congested residential area surfaced on social media soon after the blast took place. Initial reports indicate that Sunday’s blast was characteristically different from Thursday’s blast. Thursday’s blast was carried out by a suicide attacker who targeted the crowd outside the Kabul airport, while Sunday’s attack, reportedly an airstrike might not have the airport as its target — the rocket hit a residential area near the airport.
Dozens of planes, including military planes, took off from the airport during the day. All US and coalition forces are expected to leave the country on August 31, a planned deadline.