29 dead after car bombing
KABUL, Afghanistan — A car bomb exploded outside a bank on Thursday in Afghanistan’s restive Helmand province, killing 29 people waiting to collect their monthly salaries, said the provincial governor.
The car detonated in the parking lot of the New Kabul Bank in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, where dozens of people, both civilians and security personnel, had gathered.
The bomb was so potent that some victims were blown into the nearby Helmand River, officials said.
The weekend marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and ushers in several days of celebration. The month, normally a time of prayer and reflection, has been marred by a string of bloody attacks across the country that have claimed hundreds of lives.
Gov. Hayatullah Hayat said by phone that most of those killed were civilians and at least 60 people were wounded.
Soldiers guarding the bank fired their weapons into the air, in apparent panic, prompting reports that gunmen had assailed the building as well, which turned out not to be the case.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said in a WhatsApp message to journalists that the insurgents had carried out the attack but that all the victims were soldiers and police officers, some of them in civilian clothing. He said civilians had been barred from the bank at the time of the attack, but he did not address the reports of women and children being among the victims.
The governor of Helmand, Hayatullah Hayat, said that civilians and soldiers were among the dead and wounded, including children. “Most of the victims were civilians, but some were military, and we are investigating why military men came to a bank in the city, since they should collect their pay from bank branches on their bases,” Mr. Hayat said.
TV images showed a shattered scene of mangled vehicles and body parts strewn around the parking lot.
A spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, Hussien Murtazawi, said the enemy after “facing defeat in the battlefield is now targeting the civilians.”
Helmand, a center for opium production, has been the scene of fierce fighting against the Taliban for years, involving British troops, U. S. Marines and Afghan forces.
It has long been considered Afghanistan’s most violent province, and hundreds of Marines died there in battles between 2008 and 2014, when they were pulled out as part of the drawdown of U.S. troops.
In the past few years, the Taliban experienced a resurgence in the province, taking large swaths of the countryside in 2016.
A few hundred U.S. Marines recently returned to the province to bolster government forces and U.S. forces have carried out airstrikes. The Defense Department is finalizing plans to send more troops to Afghanistan where there are now 8,400 U.S. forces.
The capital, Lashkar Gah, has repeatedly come under attack from Taliban forces.
Haji Moladad Tobagar, health director in Lashkar Gah, told The Associated Press that he fears an even higher casualty toll as more victims were being brought in Thursday.
Both the Taliban and the even more brutal rival militants of the Islamic State group have unleashed and broadened a wave of deadly attacks since the start of the year.
The worsening security situation coincides with increasing political instability brought on by a power struggle in the government and rising frustration among the public about the inability of authorities to address even their most basic concerns.
On Wednesday, in its latest report, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan termed the security situation in the country as “intensely volatile.”
The U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, told the Security Council on Wednesday that an even more dangerous and fragile period for the country could be ahead.