27 killed in Afghan mosque explosion
KABUL, Afghanistan — An explosion ripped through a mosque inside an Afghan army base in the country’s volatile eastern Khost province as Friday prayers were drawing to a close, killing 27 soldiers and wounding 57, the military said.
The blast might have been set off by a suicide bomber or a remotely detonated bomb but nothing was officially confirmed and details were sketchy. No group immediately claimed responsibility.
President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack in a statement as “anti-Islamic and inhumane.” He also wanted to know how the army’s security was breached, demanding a swift investigation and the officials responsible held accountable.
It was the latest of the relentless, near-daily onslaughts in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regularly target Afghan military and police forces throughout the country.
“There were soldiers lying everywhere and the smoke was so thick, it was difficult to see,” said Abdullah, a spokesman at the base.
Like most Afghans, he uses only one name. He spoke to the Associated Press by phone from the base.
The dead and wounded were rushed to a clinic within the army base; the seriously wounded were taken to a nearby hospital.
Sakhi Sardar, head of the hospital in Khost, said most of the wounded were being treated for devastating shrapnel wounds.
The defense ministry deployed four helicopters to the Ismail Khel district where the attack occurred to ferry the worst of the wounded to hospitals in Kabul.
The explosion came days after a suicide bomber killed 55 religious scholars gathered in the Afghan capital, Kabul, to celebrate the holiday marking the birth of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The Taliban denied involvement in that bombing, which wounded 94 people.
After 17 years and billions of dollars spent training and arming Afghanistan’s military, it is struggling against an emboldened Taliban insurgency that holds sway in nearly half of the country. As well as the Taliban, Afghan troops are also battling an audacious Islamic State affiliate.
Elsewhere in Afghanistan on Friday, hundreds of protesters blocked roads in northern Parwan province to denounce the deaths of three people who they say were civilians, killed in an operation against the Taliban on Friday.