Militants stormed the national television and radio station in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on Wednesday, May 17, triggering a gunfight as journalists remained trapped inside the building, officials and eyewitnesses said, according to AFP.
No insurgent group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack in Nangarhar province, a hotbed of Islamic State jihadists, where the US military dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb last month in an unprecedented attack.
"Three gunmen entered the RTA (Radio Television Afghanistan) building this morning," government spokesman Attaullah Khogyani told AFP.
"Two of them have been killed and one is still resisting."
An RTA photographer said he fled the building as soon as the gunfight erupted, but some of his colleagues were still stuck inside. An AFP reporter near the scene of the attack also heard two explosions.
Islamic State insurgents are active in Nangarhar province, of which Jalalabad is the capital.
The US military last month dropped the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb — dubbed the "Mother Of All Bombs" — on IS positions in Nangarhar, killing dozens of jihadists.
The unprecedented attack triggered global shock waves, with some condemning the use of Afghanistan as what they called a testing ground for the weapon, and against a militant group that is not considered as big a threat as the resurgent Taliban.
According to the US Forces-Afghanistan, defections and recent battlefield losses have reduced the local IS presence from a peak of as many as 3,000 fighters to a maximum of 800.
The Pentagon has reportedly asked the White House to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan to break the deadlocked fight against the Taliban.
US troops in Afghanistan number about 8,400 today, and there are another 5,000 from NATO allies, who also mainly serve in an advisory capacity — a far cry from the US presence of more than 100,000 six years ago.
