Kabul assessing IS threat

KABUL, July 26, (RTRS): Islamic State is threatening more attacks against Afghanistan’s Hazara minority after Saturday’s suicide blasts in Kabul that killed 80 people, pledging to retaliate against support by some in the mainly Shi’ite group for the Assad regime in Syria.

But assessing the threat from DAESH, as Islamic State is known in Afghanistan, is difficult. Some question whether it was really responsible for Saturday’s blasts and some officials ask whether the ultra-radical Sunni movement, hitherto largely confined to an area near the border with Pakistan, poses a wider challenge.

A DAESH commander who uses the name Abu Omar Khorasani said the bombing of the rally by thousands of Hazaras protesting about the route of a new power line was in retaliation for the support offered by some members of the community to the regime in Syria.

Many Hazaras have gone through Shi’ite-governed Iran to fight for the government of President Bashar al-Assad, a fellow Shi’ite, against Islamic State.

“Unless they stop going to Syria and stop being slaves of Iran, we will definitely continue such attacks,” the militant commander told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location. “We can and we will strike them again.”

The government says it has been hitting DAESH hard even before Saturday’s blasts, one of the most deadly attacks in the country since the beginning of the Taleban insurgency in 2001.

It said government forces had killed hundreds of insurgents in the past two months in assaults on DAESH strongholds in the eastern province of Nangarhar, which straddles the highway from Kabul to the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

In the latest fighting, at least 122 insurgents were killed in the past 24 hours, it said on Tuesday. The numbers could not be independently confirmed.