US military transport crashes in Afghanistan

Eleven people were killed in a crash of a Air Force C-130J transport aircraft early Friday morning at an airport in eastern Afghanistan, a U.S. military spokesman said, adding that there were no reports of enemy fire at the time of the incident.

The plane crashed at approximately 12:19 a.m. on Friday at Jalalabad Airfield, about 80 miles from the capital Kabul.

A spokesman for the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan said six U.S. service members who comprised the plane's crew died, along with five civilian passengers.

The civilian contractors were working with “Resolute Support,” the NATO-led mission to train and advise Afghan security forces, according to NBC News. It follows the military mission in Afghanistan after combat operations ended at the end of 2014.

The U.S. military said the cause of the crash was under investigation.

The C-130 Hercules, a cargo plane built by Lockheed Martin, is powered by four turboprop engines and is used extensively by the military to ship troops and heavy gear. It can take off and land on rough, dirt strips and is widely used by the U.S. military in hostile areas. 

In 2011, Taliban fighters shot down a U.S. military Chinook helicopter, killing all 38 people on board.

On Friday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Twitter that its fighters shot down the plane, saying “15 invaders and a number of slave soldiers were killed.” The group typically claims responsibility for any coalition air crash.

There are about 1,000 coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan, including U.S. and Polish forces, as well as about 40,000 Afghan troops, according to NATO.

The U.S. has about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan, although the numbers are expected to go down a bit by the end of the year.

In April, a suicide bomb attack on a bank branch in Jalalabad killed at least 33 people, and was blamed on the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group. In another incident in the city, a U.S. soldier was killed in an “insider attack,” in which Afghan soldiers or policemen have turned their weapons on their U.S. or other NATO colleagues.

Al Jazeera with wire services