Two blasts struck close to the entrance of the sprawling site followed by reports of shooting inside the hospital, the Taliban and a witness said.

“Nineteen dead bodies and about 50 wounded people have been taken to hospitals in Kabul,” a health ministry official who asked not to be named told AFP.

The Taliban spent 20 years waging an insurgency against the ousted US-backed government.

Now they face the struggle of bringing stability to Afghanistan, which has been hit in recent weeks by a series of bloody assaults by the Islamic State group’s local chapter.

Tuesday’s attack has not yet been claimed by any group.

A doctor at the Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan hospital in Kabul told AFP. “I am inside the hospital. I heard a big explosion coming from the first checkpoint. We were told to go to safe rooms. I also hear guns firing. I can still hear gun firing inside the hospital building. I think the attackers are going from room to room… like the first time it was attacked,”

The hospital, which treats wounded soldiers from both the Taliban and former Afghan security forces, was previously attacked in 2017 when gunmen disguised as medical personnel killed at least 30 people in an hours-long siege.

A Taliban media spokesman confirmed two explosions hit the hospital area on Tuesday.

“One explosion has happened at the gate of the military hospital and a second somewhere near the hospital, this is our initial information, we will provide more details later,” he told AFP.

Qari Saeed Khosty, a spokesman for the interior ministry, said Taliban special forces had rushed to the scene to secure the area after “a bomb” exploded.

AFP journalists heard a second blast followed by gunfire.

The surviving family members of Mr Ahmadi who was killed by a US drone strike in August after US military intelligence mistakenly took him for an ISIS-K terrorist, had said they want the Americans responsible for the tragic mistake to be taken to court, while also asking for financial compensation and resettlement in the United States or another safe country for the rest of their lives.

Zemari Ahmadi, 43, was killed along with seven children and two adult family members. Before his death, Ahmadi was an innocent aid worker that worked for a US company.
provided protein nutrition to starving Aghan kids.

The ill-fated strike which took place days before the US military withdrew from Afghanistan came amid a frenzied evacuation effort following the Taliban’s sudden return to power and only days after a devastating attack close to Kabul’s airport by IS-K, a local branch of the Islamic State (IS) group. US Army General McKenzie described the strike as a “tragic mistake” and added that the Taliban had not been involved in the intelligence that led to the strike.

The US has now offered to pay relatives of the victims while yhe Pentagon said it was also working to help surviving members of the family relocate to the US.

The compensation offer was made in a meeting between Colin Kahl, the under-secretary of defence for policy, and Steven Kwon, the founder and president of an aid group active in Afghanistan called Nutrition and Education International, the Pentagon said in a statement.

Mr Kahl noted Mr Ahmadi and others who were killed “were innocent victims who bore no blame and we’re not affiliated with ISIS-K or threats to US forces”, said a statement attributed to Defence Department spokesman John Kirby.

He reiterated Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin’s commitment to the families, including “condolence payments”. Austin also apologised for the attack, but Mr Ahmadi’s 22-year-old nephew Farshad Haidari said that was not enough.

“They must come here and apologise to us face-to-face,” he told the AFP news agency in Kabul.

The attacker set off the explosives among the roughly 1,200 guests at the event at the Dubai City wedding hall in Kabul, Nusrat Rahimi, a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, told The Associated Press. An affiliate group of the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

“There are so many dead and wounded,” survivor Ahmad Omid said. “I was with the groom in the other room when we heard the blast and then I couldn’t find anyone. Everyone was lying all around the hall.”

The blast, which left 182 people severely injured, occurred in a western Kabul neighborhood that’s home to many of the country’s minority Shiite Hazara community, was the deadliest attack in Kabul this year.

A local affiliate of ISIS in Afghanistan wrote on an ISIS-linked website on Sunday that a Pakistani-ISIS fighter seeking martyrdom was responsible for the suicide bombing, and claimed a car bomb was also detonated in the attack.

The bombing broke a period of relative calm in Afghanistan’s capital city, after 14 people were killed and another 145 were wounded — most of them women, children and other civilians — on Aug. 7 when a Taliban car bomb aimed at Afghan security forces detonated explosives.

Kabul’s huge, brightly lit wedding halls are centers of community life in a city weary of decades of war, with thousands of dollars spent on a single evening.

Such wedding halls also serve as meeting places and, in November, at least 55 people were killed when a suicide bomber sneaked into a Kabul wedding hall where hundreds of Muslim religious scholars and clerics had gathered to mark the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Taliban denied involvement in that attack, and IS did not claim responsibility.