Suicide bomber kills dozens in Shiite area of Afghanistan

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The college prep class on the west side of Kabul was just getting underway Wednesday afternoon. All 500 seats in the private learning center were filled with high school students from the local Shiite Muslim community. Suddenly, a stranger strode into the ground-floor hall and detonated a suicide vest, witnesses said.

The room erupted in bloody mayhem, leaving at least 48 people dead and 76 wounded.

“It was a horror scene. I saw dead bodies and scattered flesh,” said Mohammed Reza Hussaindad, 27, who works in a nearby bakery. Rushing to the scene, he said, he saw some people searching for their children, others weeping in grief. “We collected human flesh in bags,” he said.

The suicide bombing at the Mowud Education Center in Kabul’s Dasht-i-Barchi district, one of the deadliest attacks in the city in the past several years, underscored both the precarious security situation in the heavily policed capital and the relentless drive of militant groups, in the name of Islam, to decimate Muslim communities they regard as heretical.

A spokesman for the Taliban insurgents immediately denied any connection to the bombing, and no other group claimed it. But the attack bore the hallmarks of previous suicide bombings by the Islamic State militia, many of them at mosques, shrines and other targets in the same Shiite and ethnic Hazara area of Kabul.

In a short message on social media, the Taliban spokesman posted that the group’s “mujahideen have no links with Kabul incident.”

Nevertheless, the deadly bombing followed a ferocious five-day Taliban siege on the eastern city of Ghazni that ended Tuesday, and the successive urban attacks left Afghans feeling exhausted.

The Taliban also claimed a ground attack early Wednesday in northern Baghlan province that left up to 44 Afghan police officers and soldiers dead, the latest in a series of such assaults by the Taliban on security targets in scattered rural areas.

The attack on Ghazni was far more devastating. It left parts of the city in ruins, killed at least 120 security forces and civilians in intense fighting, and sent residents fleeing to the countryside before the insurgents retreated under pressure from Afghan forces backed by U.S. airstrikes.