Suicide bombers hit Kabul

At least 80 dead in Afghanistan strikes

At least 80 people were killed and more than 230 wounded Saturday when two suicide bombers targeted Afghanistan’s Shiite ethnic minorities — turning a peaceful protest in Kabul into a bloodbath.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre at a traffic circle jammed with ethnic Hazaras who were demanding that a major power line pass through their electricity-starved and poverty-stricken province of Bamiyan.

“Two fighters of the Islamic State detonated their explosive belts in a gathering of Shiites in Kabul,” ISIS announced through its Amaaq news agency.

The National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency, said the attack was masterminded by Abu Ali, an ISIS commander in Nangarhar.

The death toll was the highest of any terror strike in the capital after more than a decade of fighting between Taliban fighters and Afghan and NATO forces.

The Hazara protest and its route had been announced beforehand. The march was largely peaceful before the explosions struck as the demonstrators sought to descend on the presidential palace, waving flags and chanting slogans such as “death to discrimination.”

“We had intelligence over recent days and it was shared with the demonstration organizers, we shared our concerns because we knew that terrorists wanted to bring sectarianism to our community,” presidential spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri said.

The attack was believed to have been aimed at stoking sectarian discord between Shiites and Sunnis. Since Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s, the country has largely been spared sectarian strife that is common in ISIS-infiltrated Pakistan, Iraq and Syria.

Hundreds of Hazaras have reportedly fought alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s troops in Syria against Sunni groups, including ISIS, in recent years, making Hazaras a likely target in Afghanistan.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said he was “deeply saddened” by the massacre.

“Holding protests is the right of every citizen of Afghanistan . . . but terrorists entered the protests, and carried out explosions that martyred and wounded a number of citizens including members of security forces,” the presidential palace said in a statement.

If confirmed that ISIS was behind the attack, it would be the radical Sunni jihadist group’s first major urban attack in Afghanistan.

SHELL SHOCK: A man recovers after a suicide-bombing attack by two terrorists in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday in what may be ISIS’s first attack in the country.