Taliban armed with suicide vests, guns and rockets stormed a heavily fortified airfield in Afghanistan where Prince Harry is deployed, killing two US Marines and attacking aircraft in a major security breach.
The militia, which is leading a 10-year insurgency against 117,000 NATO troops, said it carried out the assault to avenge a US-made film deemed insulting to Islam that has sparked deadly riots across the Middle East and North Africa.
The attack on Camp Bastion in southern Helmand province, one of the toughest battlegrounds of the war, started at 10:15 pm (1745 GMT) on Friday and the base was cleared on Saturday morning, said US Army Major Adam Wojack.
Prince Harry was never in danger, officials confirmed. Although the Taliban have vowed to kill the third in line to the British throne, one of its spokesmen told AFP that the assault “had nothing to do with the prince”.
General Sayed Malook, head of the Afghan army in the south, said a suicide bomber blew himself up, blasting a hole in the perimeter wall and allowing insurgents to storm inside with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
“As soon as they entered the base, fighting started. Afghan forces were not involved, they only helped to extinguish the fire,” Malook told AFP.
A fuel reservoir and an aircraft hangar were set alight and it took until dawn to extinguish the blaze, he said. The US-led NATO forces said multiple aircraft and “structures” were damaged in the assault on the airfield, which is used by both American and British forces. Eighteen insurgents were killed — including the suicide bomber — and another was wounded and captured, said Wojack. They were dressed in camouflage, he said, but declined to say whether it was Afghan army uniform.
A defense official in Washington said two US Marines were killed, while NATO’s US-led International Security Assistance Force said some personnel were wounded, but gave no details, in line with policy.
The British defence ministry described the attack, on the eastern side of the runway, as “significant”. It said personnel were afterwards subject to a “lockdown” as the base was secured.
The brazen attack is likely to raise serious questions about how insurgents managed to penetrate such a massive logistics hub in the desert, which in June Britain said was home to 28,000 soldiers.
A Taliban spokesman claimed the attack was waged to avenge a low-budget American YouTube film, “Innocence of Muslims”, which has incited a furious wave of deadly anti-American violence in Yemen, Libya and Sudan, and protests in many other countries.
“A number of mujahideen fighters have carried out suicide attacks on Camp Bastion in Helmand in revenge for the insulting movie by the Americans,” spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi told AFP by telephone.
The Taliban this week vowed to kill Prince Harry, who is deployed at the base as an Apache helicopter pilot, and who celebrates his 28th birthday on Saturday.
ISAF said it was assessing the extent of the damage to the camp, but the prince, who will spend four months at the base, was not affected.
“He was not in any danger,” said Master Sergeant Bob Barko of ISAF.
In 2008 Harry was hastily withdrawn from Afghanistan when a news blackout surrounding his deployment on the ground directing aircraft in attacks on Taliban positions, was broken.
This time, however, the government released images of him in Afghanistan from the start, saying that any risk “has been, and will continue to be, assessed”.