Dozens die in attack
At least 41 killed, more than 80 wounded in Islamic State bombing of Shiite cultural centre
KABUL — An Islamic State suicide bomber struck a Shiite cultural centre in Kabul on Thursday, killing at least 41 people and underscoring the extremist group’s growing reach in Afghanistan even as its self- styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria has been dismantled.
The attack may have targeted the pro- Iran Afghan Voice news agency housed in the two- storey building. The Sunni extremists of Islamic State view Shiite Muslims as apostates and have repeatedly attacked Afghanistan’s Shiite minority and targets linked to neighbouring Iran. The attack wounded more than 80 people, many of whom suffered severe burns.
Local Shiite leader Abdul Hussain Ramazandada said the bomber slipped into an academic seminar at the centre and blew himself up among the participants. More bombs went off just outside the centre as people fled.
The Islamic State- linked Aamaq news agency said four bombs were used in the assault, one strapped to the suicide attacker. It said the centre was funded by Iran and used to propagate Shiite beliefs.
Ali Reza Ahmadi, a journalist with Afghan Voice, said he leaped from the window of his secondfloor office after the first bomb went off and saw flames pouring from the basement.
“I jumped from the roof toward the basement, yelling at people to get water to put out the fire,” he said.
At nearby Istiqlal Hospital, Director Mohammed Sabir Nasib said the emergency room was overwhelmed. Additional doctors and nurses were called in to help. At the height of the crisis, more than 50 medics were working to save the wounded.
By late afternoon, Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Mujro said 41 people were dead and 84 others wounded.
A senior member of the local Shiite clerical council, Mohammad Asif Mesbah, said the centre may have been targeted because it houses Afghan Voice. The news agency’s owner, Sayed Eissa Hussaini Mazari, is a strong proponent of Iran, and the agency’s output is dominated by Iranian news.
On Thursday, the centre was marking the anniversary of the 1979 Soviet invasion with a seminar about the event’s impact on the country.
Mesbah said the invasion, which led to decades of war and unrest that continue to the present day, was the “beginning of all of Afghanistan’s disasters.”
Iran, a Shiite- majority country has provided heavy military and financial aid to the Syrian government as well as regional Shiite militias battling Islamic State.
The extremist group is now largely confined to a few remote patches of territory in Syria, but it retains the ability to inspire and carry out attacks further afield.
The Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, which emerged in 2014 at around the same time the group declared a caliphate in large parts of Syria and Iraq, has vowed to target Shiites. The militants attacked the Iraqi Embassy and two Shiite mosques in Kabul earlier this year, killing dozens of people.
A suicide attack on the largest Shiite mosque in the western Herat province last summer killed at least 90 people.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called the attack a “crime against humanity.”
Toby Lanzer, the acting head of the UN mission to Afghanistan, said the bombing was “another truly despicable crime in a year already marked by unspeakable atrocities.”