At least 29 people have been killed in fighting between Afghan security forces and gunmen who raided a jail overnight in an attack claimed by the ISIL (ISIS) group, officials said on Monday.
Among the dead were prisoners as well as civilians, prison guards and Afghan security personnel, Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the governor of Nangarhar province, told Al Jazeera.
Another 50 people were wounded in the attack that began late on Sunday when an ISIL suicide bomber slammed his explosive-laden vehicle into the gate of the prison, with hundreds of prisoners fleeing.
ISIL's affiliate in Afghanistan, known as IS in Khorasan, claimed responsibility for the attack. The affiliate is headquartered in Nangarhar province.
At least 10 of the group's fighters were killed by Afghan security forces, the defence ministry said in a statement.
"The attack is now over," Sohrab Qaderi, a member of the provincial council, told Reuters news agency.
Police were forced to divert manpower to recapture escaped prisoners and by noon on Monday, approximately 1,000 had been caught, according to Khogyani.
The prison houses about 2,000 inmates, including many from ISIL and the Taliban.Earlier, a Taliban spokesperson said on Twitter that the group was not involved in the attack, which came on the final day of a rare truce between the armed group and the Afghan government to mark the Eid al-Adha festival.
The prison attack came a day after the Afghan intelligence agency said a senior ISIL commander had been killed by Afghan special forces near Jalalabad, about 150km (93 miles) east of the capital, Kabul.
Nangarhar has been hit by regular attacks, several of them claimed by ISIL.
On May 12, a suicide bomber killed 32 mourners at a funeral for a police commander in the province, in one of the deadliest attacks this year, also claimed by ISIL.
A United Nations report last month estimated there are some 2,200 ISIL members in Afghanistan, and that while the group is in "territorial retreat" and its leadership has been depleted, it "remains capable of carrying out high-profile attacks in various parts of the country, including Kabul".
Efforts to get peace talks under way between the Taliban and the Kabul government have stalled after the Taliban and the United States signed an agreement in February, touted as the deal to end Washington's longest war.
The agreement, struck in Qatar's capital, Doha, lays out plans for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan in exchange for security guarantees from the Taliban.
Last week, another UN report said almost 1,300 civilians, including hundreds of children, had been killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of the year, a 13-percent drop compared with the same period in 2019.
The report credited the drop in part to the reduction of operations by international forces in support of Afghan government forces and also to a decrease in the number of attacks by ISIL.
