Foreign staff and dozens of students were trapped inside the campus of the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul after suspected militants attacked it with explosives and gunfire, a senior government official said.
The interior ministry official said that elite Afghan forces had surrounded the university compound, where shooting lasted for more than an hour after the assault began at around 6.30pm local time.
Witnesses at the scene said gunfire had since stopped, and special forces had made their way into the compound.
News on casualties were sketchy, but Mohammad Saleem Rasouly, head of hospitals in the Afghan capital, told Reuters that at least one student had been killed and 14 wounded.
Emergency hospital co-ordinator Dejan Panic said three of the nine people brought to the emergency hospital were in a serious condition.
Early reports suggested that several gunmen, some wearing suicide vests, were involved.
Taliban insurgents control large swathes of Afghanistan, and local armed forces are struggling to contain them, especially in the provinces of Helmand to the south and Kunduz to the north.
No militant group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes as the Taliban step up their summer fighting season against Western-backed Kabul government.
The Italian-run Emergency Hospital in Kabul tweeted that at least five wounded people had been brought to the facility for treatment.
The management of the university, which opened in 2006 and enrols more than 1,700 students, was not immediately reachable for comment.
The private university is usually packed with students in the evening, many of them working professionals doing part-time courses at the facility.
The attack comes after two professors at the university - an American and Australian - were kidnapped in the heart of Kabul earlier this month, the latest in a series of abductions of foreigners in the conflict-torn country.
