Blast in Kabul kills 14, as Taliban continues U.S. talks
A powerful Taliban car bomb exploded Wednesday outside the entrance of a police station in Kabul, the Afghan capital, killing 14 people and injuring at least 145 others as peace negotiations between the militants and U.S. diplomats continued.
The explosion, following repeated U.N. warnings on rising civilian casualties, was the latest to strike a heavily populated area during the morning rush hour. The blast sent plumes of thick smoke into the sky and shattered windows in a radius of about a mile.
Gen. Khoshal Sadat, Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister, said 14 people were killed and 145 wounded.
Jalal Nazari, who lives about a half mile from the scene of the attack, said he had been lying down in his room when the explosion took place.
“I thought it was in our yard,” he said. “The windows shattered and I got up and went to a corner.”
“It was a bad situation; everywhere was dark, and then shooting started,” he added. “I was so scared.”
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said the group was responsible for the attack, adding that the insurgents targeted a recruitment center for Afghan forces and that many soldiers were killed or wounded.
The attack came the morning after a tense night across Kabul, with explosions heard in several parts of the city past midnight. The Afghan intelligence agency, in a statement Wednesday morning, said it had raided three cells of the Islamic State group in different parts of the city, resulting in clashes with suspected bomb-makers.
Although the Taliban are responsible for much of the war’s insurgent violence, a small affiliate of the Islamic State has gained a stubborn foothold in the east of the country and has claimed it carried out repeated suicide attacks in urban centers.
The United Nations said July was the deadliest month in Afghanistan in the past few years, with 1,500 civilians killed or wounded.
While the global organization blamed an increase in Taliban attacks for the rise that month, it said in an earlier report on casualties over the first six months of the year that Afghan forces and their international allies were responsible for more civilian deaths than the Taliban.
In a sign of how widespread the violence is, Afghan security forces conducted nearly 100 large military operations and small commando raids and airstrikes in the past 24 hours, the defense ministry said, adding that it had killed at least 84 Taliban fighters and wounded dozens of others.
Both sides often exaggerate casualty tolls, which are difficult to independently verify.
The violence comes as U.S. diplomats are hashing out final details of a preliminary agreement with the Taliban in talks in the Qatari capital, Doha. A deal would pave the way for immediate direct negotiations between the Taliban and other Afghans over the political future of the country.
An agreement between the insurgents and the United States, expected to be finalized soon, would result in a schedule for a conditional withdrawal of the remaining 14,000 U.S. troops and their NATO partners in return for assurances on the prevention of terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies from Afghan soil.
While the United States seems to have assured a third element of its peace plan — direct negotiations between the Taliban and other Afghans, including the national government, immediately after an announcement of a schedule for troop withdrawals — there is little clarity on a demand for a comprehensive cease-fire.