KABUL, Afghanistan - The Taliban struck a restaurant popular with Westerners in downtown Kabul on Friday in what appeared to be a well-coordinated assault, with a suicide bomber clearing a path for two gunmen, who rushed in and opened fire on the patrons dining inside, the police said. At least 16 people were killed, most of them foreigners.
The attack was one of the deadliest against Westerners in Kabul since 2001, with Afghan and Western officials saying as many of 13 of the dead were expatriates.
And the Taliban’s choice of a lightly guarded restaurant marked a departure for the insurgents, who have more often sought to strike fortified government buildings and high-profile symbols of the Western presence in Afghanistan, like the U.S. Embassy and a building believed to house the CIA station in Kabul.
Those attacks have succeeded in generating headlines but inflicting relatively few casualties in the past few years. A Taliban bombing earlier this month at the entrance to Camp Eggers, a large base for the U.S.-led military coalition in the center of Kabul, did not inflict any casualties, for instance. The base is less than a mile from the restaurant.
The restaurant hit Friday, Taverna du Liban, a Lebanese restaurant whose clientele is made up largely of expatriates, had almost none of the security of those other targets, like cement blast walls or checkpoints blocking off the street where it is located.
The initial blast appeared to have been powerful. It was heard miles away and shook windows in the immediate neighborhood, a district that is home to numerous embassies and shops that serve Western aid workers, journalists and other foreign civilians who live in the city.
On Jan. 4, the Taliban claimed responsibility for an explosion at an entrance to a predominantly U.S. military base in the heart of the city. The U.S.-led coalition said there had been no casualties.
The restaurant explosion Friday shook windows across much of central Kabul, and sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard for minutes afterward.
Western embassies and the United Nations warned their staff members to stay away from neighborhood, or stay inside if they were nearby. The U.S. Embassy, a number of European embassies and the headquarters of the NATO-led coalition are all within a mile of where the blast occurred, though most are on streets blocked by multiple barricades and blast walls.
La Taverna, in contrast, is relatively easy to reach on foot or in a vehicle. Guests are ordinarily patted down by security guards before entering, but the guards would not have searched a car approaching the restaurant.
The Norwegian Embassy is on the same block. There was no immediate word whether the embassy had sustained any damage.
