Blasts in Kabul kill at least 6, hurt 17
KABUL, Afghanstan – Explosions targeting educational institutions killed at least six people, including students, and injured 17 Tuesday in a mostly Shiite neighborhood of Afghanistan’s capital city, police said.
The blasts, which occurred in rapid succession, were being investigated, and more casualties were feared, according to Kabul police spokesperson Khalid Zadran and the city’s Emergency Hospital. Several of the wounded were in serious condition; others had been treated and released.
The explosions occurred inside the Abdul Rahim Shaheed High School and near the Mumtaz Education Center several miles away, both in the predominantly Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Dasht-e-barchi. There were no immediate reports of casualties at the Mumtaz Center.
Guards in the narrow street leading to the two-story high school said they saw 10 casualties. Inside the school, an Associated Press video journalist saw walls splattered with blood, burned notebooks and children’s shoes.
The AP spoke to several private guards in the area, but they refused to give their names, fearing repercussions from the Taliban security force cordoning off the area.
It appeared a suicide bomber blew himself up inside the sprawling compound, which can house up to 1,000 students, witnesses said. It wasn’t immediately clear how many children were in the school at the time of the explosion.
The school is teaching students only until the sixth grade after Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban rulers went back on a promise to allow all girls to attend school.
No one immediately claimed responsibility. The area has been targeted in the past by Afghanistan’s deadly Islamic State affiliate, which reviles Shiite Muslims as heretics.
Save the Children in Afghanistan issued a statement “strongly condemning” the attack and saying “no school should be deliberately targeted, and no child should fear physical harm at or on the way to school.”
The Islamic State affiliate known as IS in Khorasan Province, or IS-K, has previously targeted schools. In May last year, months before the Taliban took power in Kabul, more than 60 children, mostly girls, were killed when two bombs were detonated outside their school, also in the Dasht-ebarchi neighborhood.
IS-K first emerged in 2014 in eastern Afghanistan. By 2019, it held significant territory in Nangarhar province and had pushed into neighboring Kunar province. The U.S. military waged a massive air campaign against it.
But IS survived, and it presented the greatest security challenge to the Taliban when they seized power in Afghanistan last August.
IS-K is a longtime enemy of the Taliban. The Taliban espouse a harsh interpretation of Islamic law and often used suicide attacks in their nearly 20year insurgency against the U.S. and its Afghan allies. But they have reached out to Shiites. IS, meanwhile, opposes any group that does not accept its more radical, deeply anti-shiite ideology. IS, unlike the Taliban, sees its battle as one to establish a unified Muslim world under a caliphate.