Bomber attacks massive wedding
Fears grow that the suicide blast could be deadliest assault in Kabul this year.
KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide-bomb blast ripped through a wedding party on a busy Saturday night in Afghanistan’s capital and dozens of people were killed or wounded, a government official said. More than 1,000 people had been invited, one witness said, as fears grew that it could be the deadliest attack in Kabul this year.
Interior Ministry spokesman Nusrat Rahimi told the Associated Press the attacker set off explosives among the wedding participants. Both the Taliban and a local affiliate of the Islamic State group carry out bloody attacks in the capital.
Officials were not expected to release a toll until daytime Sunday.
“There are so many dead and wounded,” said Ahmad Omid, a survivor who said about 1,200 guests had been invited to the wedding for his father’s cousin. “I was with the groom in the other room when we heard the blast and then I couldn’t find anyone. Everyone was lying all around the hall.”
Outside a hospital, families wailed. Other people were covered in blood.
The blast at the Dubai City wedding hall in western Kabul, a part of the city that many in the minority Shiite Hazara community call home, shattered a period of relative calm in the capital. On Aug. 7, a Taliban car bomb aimed at Afghan security forces detonated on the same road, killing 14 people and wounding 145 — most of them women, children and other civilians.
Kabul’s huge, brightly lit wedding halls are a center of community life in a city weary of decades of war, with thousands of dollars spent on a single evening.
“Devastated by the news of a suicide attack inside a wedding hall in Kabul. A heinous crime against our people; how is it possible to train a human and ask him to go and blow himself [up] inside a wedding?!!” Sediq Sediqqi, spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, tweeted.
The wedding halls also serve as meeting places, and in November at least 55 people were killed when a suicide bomber sneaked into a Kabul wedding hall where hundreds of Muslim religious scholars and clerics had gathered to mark the birthday of the prophet Muhammad.
The Taliban denied involvement in an attack.
Saturday night’s explosion came a few days after the end of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, with Kabul residents visiting family and friends, and just before Afghanistan marks its 100th independence day on Monday under heavier security in a city long familiar with checkpoints and razor wire.
The blast comes at an especially uncertain time in Afghanistan as the United States and the Taliban near a deal to end the 18-year war.
The Afghan government has been sidelined from those discussions, and Sediqqi said earlier Saturday that his government was waiting to hear results of President Trump’s meeting Friday with his national security team about the negotiations. Top issues include a U.S. troop withdrawal and Taliban guarantees to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a launching pad for global terrorist attacks.