A senior Taliban military commander in Kabul was among the fighters killed when his men responded to an Islamic state attack on a hospital officials confirmed Wednesday.
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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 Taliban spent 20 years waging an insurgency against the ousted US-backed government before seizing control of Kabul in August.
Now they face the struggle of bringing stability to Afghanistan, which has been hit in recent weeks by a series of bloody assaults claimed by rivals, the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K).
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Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid played down the death toll and said the attack was put down within 15 minutes thanks to the rapid intervention.
