Sven Dirks, Wikimedia Commons

No Americans were killed or injured, the Associated Press reports. A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Kabul said all consulate personnel were safe, though some staff had been temporarily evacuated to the capital.

The assault began just before 6 a.m. when militants launched rocket-propelled grenades at the consulate’s front gate. A truck bomb later caused enough damage to allow the attackers entry into an outer ring of the heavily guarded compound. Some insurgents appeared to be wearing suicide explosive devices, according to a statement from the State Department.

SEE ALSO: Obama: US Troops To Leave Afghanistan by 2014

Gunfire persisted for about two hours, witnesses told the Wall Street Journal, leaving three Afghan consulate guards and an interpreter dead. Twenty other people were injured, many of them civilians. Herat police said the assault ended when the attackers—at least six total—were killed.

The attack, occurring just over a year after the September 2012 assault on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, comes as the U.S. prepares to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, with the goal of leaving the country by 2014.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Reach Executive Producer Chrystal Li here.