Explosions and heavy automatic gunfire were heard hours after five well-armed suicide bombers attacked the British Council in Kabul on Friday, leaving at least eight people dead, officials said.

Two iReporters were in Kabul and captured the seconds after the explosions and what it was like in the hours that followed:

"It was 5:40 when a very strong explosion shook my house and woke me up," said iReporter Nazir Ekhlass. "The first thing that came to my mind was 'may[be] it's a rocket that hit very close to my house.'"

Ekhlass, 23, went up to his roof to immediately take the photos above. "The Taliban claimed credit for the attack," he said. "and the reason they say was 'we have defeated Britain in 1919, this attack is to refresh the defeat.'"

For iReporter Joseph Andrew Grosso, 30, the blasts hit close to home. He lives about two blocks away from the British Council. "I woke up with the first blast ringing in my ears and our whole house shaking," he wrote in his iReport.

"[I ran] to the rooftop with my friends and my camera, tousled headed but instantly awake," the New York native said. "We watched the rest of the attack all day."