Suicide bomber kills 57 registering to vote

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — A suicide bomber killed at least 57 people Sunday as they lined up at a government office in Kabul to register to vote, raising new concerns about the potential for violence to undermine Afghanistan’s long-delayed parliamentary elections.

The attacker detonated his explosives as Afghan authorities distributed national identity cards in the western part of Kabul, the capital, part of a push by the government to get more people to register to vote. Wahidullah Majrooh, a spokesman for the Afghan Health Ministry, said the attack also wounded at least 119 others.

Among the dead were 25 men, 22 women and eight children, while two bodies were not identifiable, Majrooh said.

Public interest in the October elections has been alarm- ingly low because of voter fatigue after successive fraudulent elections and concerns about the threat to safety at polling stations posed by suicide bombers and other vio- lence from groups opposing the government.

Soon after the Taliban denied responsibility, the Islamic State said that it was behind the carnage, according to the group’s Amaq news agency. Although the group’s area of control and number of fighters in Afghanistan have largely been reduced through heavy airstrikes and commando operations, the militants still continue to claim attacks in urban centers.

At the scene of the attack, relatives of the victims tried to go past the police cordon for news of their loved ones. Windows of some of the nearby

homes were blown out. Fire- fighters tried to wash away the blood and human remains from the sidewalks and walls, the drainage canals flooded with bloody water.

Among the victims were children in uniform who were on their way to a nearby school. A picture circulating on social media showed one young child in the morgue still wearing her pink school- bag, pulled up as a pillow to her hair, which was covered in blood.

“I have carried so many bodies that I cannot even talk,” said Mohammad Karim, 47, who lives nearby. “What is our pain? It is an ongoing pain and misery. They are attack- ing us and we are being mar-

tyred. I carried about 12 bodies. I carried a daughter and mother. The daughter’s brain was smashed out, the mother’s abdomen was cut open.”

A separate explosion near a voter registration center in the northern province of Baghlan killed five people and wounded four others, officials there said.

In the week since voter registration began, staff members have been abducted in the western province of Ghor, and at least one registration center came under rocket fire in Badghis province in the country’s northwest. In the eastern city of Jalalabad, gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed two police officers guarding a voter registration center.

MASSOUD HOSSAINI / AP A woman shouts and cries Sunday at a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, after losing her son in a suicide bombing. The Islamic State has claimed credit for the attack, which came at a government office where people were lined up for national identity cards.