Suicide bomber targets Shiite high school students
KABUL — A suicide bomber struck a private education centre in a Shiite neighbourhood of Kabul on Wednesday where high school graduates were preparing for university entrance exams, killing 48 young men and women and leaving behind a scene of devastation and tragedy.
The bombing, blamed on the Islamic State group, was the latest assault on Afghanistan’s Shiite community, which has increasingly been targeted by Sunni extremists who consider Shiites to be heretics.
It also showed how militants are still able to stage large-scale attacks, even in the heart of Kabul, and underscored the struggles of the Afghan forces to provide security and stability on their own.
The attack comes amid a particularly bloody week in Afghanistan that has seen Taliban attacks kill scores of Afghan troops and civilians.
It was not immediately clear how the bomber managed to sneak into the building, used by the Shiite community as an education centre, in the Dashti Barcha area of Kabul.
The spokesperson for the public health ministry, Wahid Majroh, said 67 people were also wounded in the bombing and that the death toll — which steadily rose in the immediate aftermath of the bombing — could rise further. He did not say if all the victims were students and whether any of their teachers were also among the casualties.
Dawlat Hossain, father of 18year-old student Fareba who had left her class just a few minutes before the bombing but was still inside the compound, was on his way to meet his daughter and started running when he heard the explosion.
Hossain recounted to The Associated Press how when he entered Fareba’s classroom, he saw parts of human bodies all over student desks and benches.
“There was blood everywhere, all over the room, so scary and horrible,” he said. After finding out that his daughter was safe, he helped move the wounded to hospitals.
The explosion initially set off gunfire from Afghan guards in the area, leading to assumptions that there were more attackers involved, but officials later said all indications were that there was only one bomber.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack but Jawad Ghawari, a member of the city’s Shiite clerical council blamed IS, which has carried similar attacks on Shiites in the past, hitting mosques, schools and cultural centres. In the past two years, there were at least 13 attacks on the Shiite community in Kabul alone, he said.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned the “terrorist” attack that “martyred and wounded the innocent” — students attending class — and ordered an investigation into the attack.
“By targeting educational and cultural centres, terrorists have clearly shown they are against all those Islamic principles (that strive) for both men and women to learn and study,” Ghani said in a statement.
Also Wednesday, six children were killed when they tinkered with an unexploded rocket shell, causing it to blow up, said Sarhadi Zwak, spokesperson for the governor of the eastern Laghman province. The victims were girls, aged 10-12, who were gathering firewood, he said, blaming the Taliban.
Afghanistan is littered with unexploded ordnance left by decades of war. It is also plagued by roadside bombs planted by insurgents, which often kill and maim civilians.