Afghan carnage
48 killed, scores hurt in 2 suicide bombings
CHARIKAR, Afghanistan — President Ashraf Ghani stepped out of an armored car, accepted bouquets from costumed schoolgirls and strode onto the stage of an outdoor campaign rally just before noon Tuesday, beaming and raising his arms as thousands of people cheered and waved miniature Afghan flags.
Moments later, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle detonated outside the entrance to the event, a quarter-mile away, killing 26 people and wounding more than 30. Ghani and his running mate in the Sept. 28 elections, Amrullah Saleh, were unharmed.
Less than an hour afterward, in Kabul, the capital, 35 miles south, a second suicide bombing near the U.S. Embassy and the Afghan Defense Ministry killed 22 people and wounded 38, officials said. The attacks, both claimed by Taliban insurgents, made Tuesday the deadliest day for civilians in Afghanistan since U.S.Taliban peace talks collapsed Sept. 8.
The pair of bombings also injected a new level of alarm into the presidential race, which the Taliban has denounced and vowed to disrupt. A Taliban statement Tuesday said the group had targeted “a rally for the fake presidential election” and noted that it had previously warned people to stay away from campaign rallies and other election events.
The attacks came one day after a U.S. Special Forces soldier was killed by smallarms fire during an operation in Wardak Province, an insurgent-dominated area 30 miles south of Kabul. U.S. military officials said Army Sgt. 1st Class Jeremy Griffin, 41, of Greenbrier, Tenn., was killed in that attack.
Griffin’s death raised to 17 the number of U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan this year, already higher than the 13 combat deaths in all of 2018. More than 2,400 U.S. service members have died in the country since 2001.
Until early this month, U.S.Taliban peace talks seemed to be nearing a framework agreement in which the United States would have withdrawn about 5,000 troops in the coming months in exchange for Taliban officials agreeing to renounce Al Qaeda and prevent it from operating on Afghan soil.
The Ghani government has remained determined to hold elections despite President Trump’s abrupt decision to cancel the talks and public concerns about violence. Officials have pledged to protect the polls with about 70,000 security forces, but they have also decided to close more than 2,500 of about 7,400 polling sites in provinces where insurgents are active. Taliban militants are estimated to control or influence nearly half the country’s 400 districts, most of them rural.
Ghani, who is seeking a second five-year term, has campaigned steadily, flying to more than a dozen provinces to hold rallies. All have been held under heavy security, with attendees searched multiple times.
The event in Charikar, held on a field inside a police training compound, was the first to be directly targeted. Health officials said women and children were among the victims. The town is in Parwan Province, one of four among Afghanistan’s 34 provinces that election officials had expected to be the safest.
On July 28, the first day of the campaign period, the Taliban detonated a truck bomb outside the Kabul office of Saleh, Ghani’s running mate and an outspoken anti-Taliban figure. The bomb killed 30 people and wounded over 50.
The group also claimed a car bombing Sept. 5 in Kabul that killed 12 people, including an American service member. The Taliban has since hinted it would be open to reviving talks, but its chief negotiator said last week that if U.S. forces do not leave, it would keep fighting “for a hundred years.”
The threat of violence, combined with uncertainty about whether the election would be held, has severely limited campaigning for most of the other 16 candidates in the race.