A huge truck bomb in Kabul early Friday killed fifteen people in the first major attack in the Afghan capital since the announcement of Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s death.

A huge truck bomb in Kabul early Friday killed fifteen people in the first major attack in the Afghan capital since the announcement of Taliban leader Mullah Omar's death.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes as the Taliban step up their summer offensive despite a bitter power transition within the militant movement.

Women and children were among the casualties of the powerful blast that struck Shah Shaheed, a neighborhood in east Kabul, but rattled homes across the city, damaging buildings and shattering windows.

The force of the explosion left an enormous crater in the road, around 10 meters deep, and reduced the front of nearby buildings to rubble.

"The death toll from the early Friday attack... has risen to 15," deputy presidential spokesman Sayed Zafar Hashemi told AFP, increasing the earlier figure of eight dead.

"The killed and wounded include women and children, and laborers of a nearby marble stone company are among the victims. The attack was intended to cause mass murder," Kabul police chief General Abdul Rahman Rahimi said.

Health ministry spokesman Wahidullah Mayar said the number of wounded could run into the hundreds, with most suffering injuries from flying glass.

It was not clear whether the intended target was an Afghan National Army base close to Shah Shaheed, a largely middle-class civilian residential area with no major foreign presence, but Rahimi said no military casualties were reported.

The wounded were trickling into city hospitals, Mayar said, with reports emerging of blood shortages and urgent appeals for donors circulating on social media.

The carnage comes a day after Taliban insurgents killed nine people in multiple attacks on police targets in southern and eastern Afghanistan.