A BLOODY ATTACK, A WORRYING TREND
41 dead as ISIL threat spreads across region
KABUL • The self-styled caliphate of the Islamic State may have collapsed in Iraq and Syria, but the terror group is still very capable of bringing deadly violence to the world’s trouble spots.
On Thursday, an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) suicide bomber struck a Shiite cultural centre in Kabul, killing at least 41 people and underscoring the extremist group’s growing reach in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump boosted forces in the country amid signs that the Afghanistan government was losing ground to ISIL and the Taliban.
Just last week, Vice President Mike Pence told U.S. troops during a surprise visit to the country that “victory is closer than ever” in what has become the longest war in U.S. history.
But Thursday’s attack shows that while ISIL is now largely confined to a few remote patches of territory in Syria, it retains the ability to inspire and carry out attacks further afield. Powerful affiliates in Afghanistan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula continue to launch regular assaults against security forces and civilians.
The ISIL affiliate in Afghanistan, which emerged in 2014 at around the same time the group declared a caliphate in large parts of Syria and Iraq, has vowed to target Shiites. The extremists attacked the Iraqi Embassy and two Shiite mosques in Kabul earlier this year, killing dozens of people. A suicide attack on the largest Shiite mosque in the western Herat province last summer killed at least 90 people.
Afghanistan’s ISIL affiliate largely consists of displaced Uzbek militants and disgruntled former members of the much larger and more entrenched Taliban movement. The Taliban and ISIL share the goal of overthrowing Afghanistan’s Westernbacked government and imposing a harsh version of Islamic law, but they are fiercely divided over leadership, tactics and ideology, and have clashed on a number of occasions. The Taliban denied any involvement in Thursday’s attack.
The Sunni extremists of ISIL view Shiite Muslims as apostates.
Local Shiite leader Abdul Hussain Ramazandada said the bomber Thursday slipped into an academic seminar at the cultural centre and blew himself up among the participants. More bombs went off just outside as people fled.
Community members said many inside the centre at the time were educated young people and children taking religious classes.
The ISIL-linked Aamaq news agency said four bombs were used in the assault, one strapped to the suicide attacker. It said the centre was funded by Iran and used to propagate Shiite beliefs.
Ali Reza Ahmadi, a journalist with Afghan Voice which is housed in the centre, said he leaped from the window of his second-floor office after the first bomb went off and saw flames pouring from the basement.
“I jumped from the roof toward the basement, yelling at people to get water to put out the fire,” he said.
A senior member of the local Shiite clerical council, Mohammad Asif Mesbah, said the centre may have been targeted because it houses Afghan Voice. The news agency’s owner, Sayed Eissa Hussaini Mazari, is a strong proponent of Iran, and the agency’s output is dominated by Iranian news. Iran has provided heavy military and financial aid to the Syrian government as well as regional Shiite militias battling ISIL in recent years.
On Thursday, the centre was marking the anniversary of the 1979 Soviet invasion with a seminar about the event’s impact on the country. Mesbah said the invasion, which led to decades of war and unrest that continue to the present day, was the “beginning of all of Afghanistan’s disasters.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called the attack a “crime against humanity.” U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, John Bass, said, “We remain confident the Afghan government and people, supported by their friends and partners, will defeat those behind these terrible acts.”
Toby Lanzer, the acting head of the United Nations mission to Afghanistan, said the bombing was “another truly despicable crime in a year already marked by unspeakable atrocities.”
Afghan forces have struggled to combat both the Taliban and ISIL since U.S. and international forces officially concluded their combat mission at the end of 2014 and shifted to a support and counterterrorism role.