Kabul Hotel On Fire After Attack

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June 28th, 2011
11:44 PM ET



..and Erin Cunningham report

Video: NATO puts end to Kabul hotel siege

Editor's note: Anderson Cooper speaks with journalist Erin Cunningham about a brazen attack on a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Seven Taliban attacked Kabul's Hotel Inter-Continental in a brazen, carefully orchestrated operation that began Tuesday night and continued into Wednesday, ending with their deaths and those of 11 other people some six hours after it began, police said.

"We are still searching the hotel; the death number may increase," said Chief of Criminal Investigations Mohammad Zahir on Wednesday morning. Twelve people were wounded or injured, he added.

"The situation is secure," Interior Minister Bismullah Khan said. By then, the top floor of the hotel was ablaze, but within a couple of hours, the flames were gone, though smoke continued to rise from the wreckage.

Two security personnel were killed in the attack, he said.

By dawn, security forces were allowing reporters to approach the hotel, and some guests were seen departing.

Saiz Ahmed, a U.S. citizen in Kabul for a Ph.D. project, was among them. "I'm sure none of us thought we were going to make it," he said after having stayed on the floor of his darkened bedroom for more than five hours listening to gunfire and occasional bomb blasts. "I wrote my little will -- just in case."

The Taliban penetrated the hotel's typically heavy security in the attack, and one of them detonated an explosion on the second floor, said Erin Cunningham, a journalist for The Daily in Kabul.

Rocket-propelled grenades were launched from the roof of the hotel toward the first vice president's house. A few moments later, the hotel was rocked by three explosions, one of which knocked her off her feet, Cunningham said. U.S. forces were on the scene, she added.

At about 2 a.m., four hours after the attack began, International Security Assistance Force helicopters fired at insurgents on the roof, killing as many as three of the gunmen, ISAF spokesman Maj. Tim James told CNN.

An hour later, ISAF said the Afghan security forces had cleared the roof and were clearing the rest of the hotel.

At 4 a.m., police believed that all the attackers were dead, "but one was alive and hidden, and he started to resist" and continued to do so until 6:20 a.m., Zahir said.

At least one of the attackers detonated his explosives, said Afghan Lt. Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, the city's chief of police.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in an e-mail that the suicide attackers entered the hotel after killing the security guards at the entrance.

"One of the suicide attackers told us on the phone that they are in the lobby and chasing guests into their rooms by smashing the doors of the rooms," Mujahid told CNN in an e-mail he sent as the incident was unfolding.

There were no indications that U.S. military or diplomatic personnel were at the hotel, U.S. officials told CNN.

The Inter-Continental is popular among international guests. A news conference had been scheduled to take place there Wednesday to discuss the planned transition of security from international to Afghan forces that U.S. President Barack Obama announced last week. Obama was briefed on the attack while en route back to Washington from Iowa, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

Members of the Afghan National Security Forces were on the scene, but the city police had the lead, ISAF Maj. Jason Waggoner said in a statement. Waggoner said ISAF forces provided "some limited assistance."

Electricity around the hotel was shut off, said Jerome Starkey, a reporter for The Times.

The United States condemned the attack on the hotel, with State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland saying it "once again demonstrates the terrorists' complete disregard for human life."

The hotel was developed by the InterContinental Hotels Group and opened in 1969. But it has had no association with the group since the Soviet invasion in 1979, though it continues to use the name and logo without connection to the parent company.

The incident came on the same day that Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell announced that NATO and other members of the international community involved in Afghanistan have decided to increase the number of security forces in the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police to 352,000.

The current number of Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police is about 300,000, the commander of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan and commanding general of the Combined Security Transition Command told the Atlanta Press Club.

The increased number will be sufficient to give the Afghans security without coalition forces having to do it, he said.

Tuesday's attack recalls a November 2008 assault on luxury hotels in Mumbai, India, which left more than 160 dead, including nine of the 10 gunmen who launched the attacks.

Officials said the gunmen targeted the Oberoi and the Taj Mahal hotels for their popularity with international travelers and tourists. The Taj Mahal was set afire.

The three-day stand-off between gunmen and police ended with the capture of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving gunman. Kasab was sentenced to death in 2010 and is awaiting an appeal of the decision to the Supreme Court in New Delhi. India says Kasab has told investigators that he and the others were trained for more than a year in Pakistan by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a banned Islamic militant group.

CNN's Reza Sayah in Islamabad, Pakistan; Tom Watkins in Atlanta; Barbara Starr, Larry Shaughnessy and Elise Labott in Washington and journalist Jonathan Boone in Kabul contributed to this report.

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Prone on the floor, U.S. guest wrote his will in Kabul hotel

By the CNN Wire Staff
June 29, 2011 -- 5:55 a.m. EDT


Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Saiz Ahmed, an American Ph.D. student in Kabul studying Afghan legal history, had just eaten dinner and returned to his fourth-floor room at the Hotel Inter-Continental when he heard odd noises. His room was pitch black because the electricity was out, and he did not initially recognize the sounds.

"I thought it was construction," he said, recalling that a sign he had seen earlier in the day on the elevator apologizing to guests for work being done.

But the noises got louder, and he soon realized that it was not construction. "It was clear that people were shooting from inside the building -- a number of people I didn't know where -- and from outside," he said. "I didn't know who was who."

Over the three or four hours, the gunfire was punctuated by an explosion every 45 minutes or so, he said. "They might have been people blowing themselves up," he said, adding he heard six or seven such blasts.

As the blasts continued, he got calls on his cell phone from his relatives in Kabul, from his relatives in the United States and from the U.S. Embassy. All of them offered the same advice: Stay put.

Heeding that advice, he stayed inside the room on the floor, near a corner that he thought might be safest. But the explosions got closer.

"I've never experienced explosions that near," he said. "The ground shook."

The last explosion occurred frighteningly close. "I felt the ground move up," he said. "I was just praying that the next one wouldn't be right under me or above me or anywhere else where there were people."

Ahmed said he felt like death was imminent. "I'm sure none of us thought we were going to make it," he said. "I wrote my little will -- just in case."

He then placed the document in his pocket. It stipulates, according to Islamic law, the charities to which he wanted to donate.

Finally, after some six hours, he could hear English being spoken in the hallway yelling "fire" and urging guests locked in their rooms to come out. He followed their orders and entered the hallway, where the air was thick with dust. He and other guests there were ordered to put their hands up and identify themselves. They were escorted to the basement, where security officials checked them to ensure they were not Taliban and where relief cascaded upon them.

"As soon as we were able to get to the basement, people started praying, thanking God," he said.

After about an hour, they were released. The carcasses of cars that had been blown up littered the parking lot. Glass from the hotel windows lay in shards.

But, though they had been told the danger was over, shooting erupted nearby. Ahmed and a group of fellow guests ran down the hill on which the hotel was built.

Ahmed said he never saw the attackers and is glad he didn't. "I think I might not be here if that was the case," he said. Still, he had spent much of the night imagining what he would do if he had come into contact with them. "I could convince them that what they were doing was stupid," he said. "To target civilians like that."

But Ahmed said the experience has left him anxious to express himself to others, too, including to U.S. President Barack Obama, who announced last week that all of the 33,000 additional U.S. forces he ordered to Afghanistan in December 2009 will be home within 15 months.

"I'm very mad about this war -- on all sides," Ahmed said. "I'd say this war needs to end now. This war that his predecessor started could have been avoided. Forgive me for going off, but this is what I was thinking in my room when I didn't know if I would see my wife again, would see my family again. And I was thinking: This is the life of Afghans for the past 10 years."

The United States did not need to initiate a war nearly a decade ago to kill Osama bin Laden, whose al group carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ahmed said.

"I want everybody involved who has forces here on Afghan soil to think about that," he said. "There has got to be a peaceful solution to this. It's just crazy."

CNN's Brian Walker contributed to this story

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