In Afghan Attack, Death Toll Hits 21, Mostly Foreigners

At least 21 people — most of them foreigners — died when the Taliban struck a restaurant popular with Westerners in downtown Kabul, the police said Saturday, as officials described what appeared to be a well-coordinated assault, with a suicide bomber clearing a path for two gunmen who rushed in and fired on diners. The attack appeared to be one of the deadliest against Western civilians in Kabul since 2001, with Afghan and Western officials saying as many as 13 of the dead were expatriates. Afghan authorities said those killed included citizens of Canada, Russia and Lebanon. Though Afghan and Western authorities were still trying to determine the identities of all those killed, the office of Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said in a statement issued late Friday that “four United Nations personnel, along with a number of those from other international organizations, are now confirmed dead.” The International Monetary Fund said its representative in Afghanistan, Wabel Abdallah, was also among those killed. Mr. Abdallah, 60, had served in Afghanistan since 2008, and had managed to maintain a good working relationship with Afghan officials through a series of scandals that left many western officials at odds with their Afghan counterparts.

The choice of a lightly guarded restaurant was a departure for the Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the attack. The insurgents have more often sought to strike fortified government buildings and high-profile symbols of the Western presence in Afghanistan, like the American Embassy and a building believed to house the C.I.A. station in Kabul. Those attacks have succeeded in generating headlines but have inflicted relatively few casualties in the past few years. A Taliban bombing this month at the entrance to Camp Eggers, a large base for the American-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, Taverna du Liban.

The restaurant, which serves Lebanese food and has a clientele made up largely of expatriates, had almost none of the security enjoyed by official installations, like concrete blast walls or checkpoints blocking off the street it is on. The initial blast appeared to have been powerful. It was heard miles away and shook windows in the immediate neighborhood, which is home to numerous embassies and shops that serve Western aid workers, journalists and other foreign civilians who live in the city.

The Taliban claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties and said they had killed a high-ranking German official.

The German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, reached by phone, would say only that it was “dealing with the incident and is working hard to clarify the facts.”

Hashmatullah Stanikzai, a spokesman for the Kabul police, said on Saturday morning that the death toll in the attack stood at 21, including the 13 foreigners. The Afghans killed were believed to included the restaurant’s owner and the men who guarded its front door.

Most, if not all, of the foreigners killed or wounded were likely to have been civilians; coalition service members are rarely allowed to go to restaurants or socialize outside their bases. The American Embassy said all United States diplomats, development workers and other officials based in Kabul were accounted for. It had no information on whether other American citizens might be among the dead. Police officers swarmed through the neighborhood, Wazir Akbar Khan, after the blast, blocking off streets. They were soon joined by smaller groups of coalition soldiers, along with Afghan Army troops and operatives from the National Directorate of Security, the country’s main intelligence agency. A tight cordon kept most people from going near the restaurant. Late into the night, relatives of the Afghans who worked there waited nervously behind the police lines in near-freezing temperatures for word of those they had been unable to reach. A tearful teenage boy, who gave his name only as Muhammad, said his older brother was a guard at the restaurant. A few police officers tried to comfort him, but he could not stop crying and repeating, “My brother, my brother.”

The Twitter account of a woman named Mona Hamade said her father owned the restaurant and was inside at the time of the attack. She could not reach him and was asking for help in finding him.

According to Afghan and Western officials, the attackers appear to have approached the restaurant on foot. The suicide bomb killed three Afghans guarding the entrance to the restaurant and blew through a thin steel door that is usually bolted from the inside and opened only after patrons are patted down.

The gunmen then rushed in and began shooting diners until police officers arrived a few minutes later and killed the assailants, said a Kabul police official, who asked not to be identified because the authorities were still trying to determine precisely what had happened.

“A majority of those killed were foreigners,” the official said. “They were all shot dead after the suicide bombing.”

Though the Taliban have mounted numerous attacks in Kabul, they have rarely sought to directly target the thousands of Western civilians who live in the city unattached to any embassy.

In January 2011, a suicide attack on a supermarket popular with foreigners killed 14 people, including five foreigners and an Afghan family. The supermarket was only blocks from the scene of Friday’s attack. In September 2012, a suicide bomber struck a minibus that was carrying flight crew members under contract with the United States government, killing 14 people, including 10 foreigners. Hezb-i-Islami, a separate insurgent group, took responsibility for the attack.

But for the most part, the thousands of Western civilians who live in Kabul have felt very little of the threat posed by the insurgents. Outside of embassies and other official missions, few expatriates have altered what is a fairly vulnerable existence, even as security in other parts of Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. Many expatriates still live in houses guarded only by the high walls that usually surround Afghan homes. They frequent a handful of well-established restaurants, many of which serve alcohol, and loud parties at private homes are still weekly occurrences.