Islamic State claims deadly bombing in Kabul
The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Islamic State claimed a bombing that left at least 80 people dead Saturday at a peaceful demonstration in the Afghan capital of Kabul, raising fears that the group may be extending its reach beyond the country’s eastern pockets, where it generally operates.
The Afghan Interior Ministry, in a statement Sunday, said the attack on thousands of Hazaras, an ethnic minority group staging the protest, had been a suicide mission.
“The attack was carried out by three suicide bombers: The first person carried out a blast, the second one failed at his detonation, and the third terrorist was killed in shooting by the security forces,” the ministry said.
The second assailant was presumed to be at large, a security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss intelligence matters.
At least 231 people at the protest were wounded. The demonstrators had gathered in the west of Kabul to demand that a proposed electricity transmission line be routed through Bamian, a Hazara-dominated province in central Afghanistan.
The Islamic State, in a statement on the group’s Amaq News Agency, claimed the carnage as a “martyrdom attack” on Shiites.
Officials saw the Islamic State’s first assault on the Afghan capital as retaliation for operations by Afghan ground forces and American airstrikes that have intensified in recent weeks, targeting the group’s stronghold in eastern Nangarhar Province.
Afghan security officials said that while Kabul remained under constant insurgent threat, they had no prior intelligence of a particular threat to the protest. After the attack, officials intercepted information from Islamic State commanders in the Achin district, the group’s base in eastern Afghanistan where villagers have been terrorized for months now, congratulating each other for the carnage, the security official said.
President Ashraf Ghani, appearing on national television to announce a day of mourning, called the bombing a “cowardly attack on the freedoms of our citizens.” In meetings with religious leaders and his security team, he said the attack had been the work of the Islamic State.
Much of the city had been under lockdown before the protesters came out early Saturday. Mr. Ghani’s government had stacked shipping containers to block routes to the presidential palace in anticipation of the demonstration.
The Hazaras have only in the past decade tried to shake off a long history of oppression. The protest leaders said the government remained rife with “systematic bias” against the Hazaras, and had routed the electricity transmission line elsewhere, depriving the central Afghan region not only of electricity but also of the roads and other infrastructure that would come with it.
The government has rejected the claims, saying that the route of the transmission line was decided purely on technical grounds and that Bamian would still be provided with electricity. (Government officials, who said they had increased efforts to address the plight of central Afghanistan in the past two years, consider the protests manipulated by the political opposition.)
Saturday’s attack was one of the deadliest in the past 15 years on the Hazaras, a largely Shiite group. In December 2011, a suicide bombing in a Shiite shrine in Kabul killed at least 63 people, mostly Hazaras.
The emergence of Islamic State affiliates in late 2014 and early 2015 in eastern and small areas of southern Afghanistan was seen as a splintering in the Taliban insurgency. Though the new groups engaged in the Islamic State’s cruel style of violence, security officials said they saw little sign of communications with the terror network’s headquarters in Iraq and Syria. Instead, the local groups were mostly former Pakistani and Afghan Taliban who had embraced the new brand of terror from a distance.
Mr. Ghani had declared Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan defeated in March, but the group’s reemergence forced him to travel to Nangarhar Province just last week and order his commanders to intensify their efforts. Salim Khan Kunduzi, the governor of Nangarhar, said operations against the group were being carried out across several districts.