Suicide bomber kills 34 students
Amnesty International calls IS attack in Afghan Shia neighbourhood a ‘war crime’
AS AFGHANISTAN’S Shias mourned their dead and held funeral services yesterday, the Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility for the horrific suicide bombing in Kabul that targeted a Shia neighbourhood the previous day, killing 34 students.
Grieving families gathered to bury their dead but even amid the sombre atmosphere there was no respite from violence, underscoring the near-daily, persistent threats in the war-battered country.
Two gunmen besieged a compound belonging to the Afghan intelligence service in a northwestern neighbourhood early yesterday, opening fire as Afghan security forces moved in to cut them off. The standoff lasted for nearly six hours before police killed the gunmen and secured the area. IS, in a posting on its Aamaq News Agency, claimed more than 200 people were killed or wounded in the suicide bombing.
The bomber, who had walked into a classroom in a one-room building at a Shia educational centre in Dasht-e-Barchi, where he set off his explosives, was identified as “the martyrdom-seeking brother Abdul Raouf al-Khorasani”. Afghanistan’s IS affiliate is known as The Islamic State in Khorasan Province, after an ancient name of the area that encompassed parts of present-day Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The bombing also wounded 57 students, according to Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Majroh. Earlier, the ministry revised an earlier death toll to 34, not 48.
Most of the victims were young men and women, high school graduates preparing for university entrance exams.
The Dasht-e-Barchi area is populated by members of Afghanistan’s minority ethnic Hazaras – a Shia community that has been targeted by similar large-scale attacks. IS, which considers Shias to be heretics, frequently targets them.
Fifteen of the victims’ bodies were taken yesterday to a Hazara community compound in Kabul where a mass funeral service was being held. The remaining victims were taken to their villages to be buried there, said Gulam Hassan, the cousin of one of the victims.
The attack, which came at the end of more than a week of assaults that have left scores of Afghan troops and civilians dead, shows how militants are still able to stage large-scale attacks and undermine efforts by Afghan forces to provide security and stability on their own.
Yesterday, Amnesty International denounced the attack, calling it a war crime. “The deliberate targeting of civilians and the targeting of places of education is a war crime,” said Samira Hamidi, its South Asia campaigner. “Mounting civilian casualties show beyond any doubt that Afghanistan and, in particular, its capital, Kabul, are not safe.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has also condemned the “terrorist” attack that “martyred and wounded the innocent” – students attending class – and ordered an investigation to determine how the bomber had managed to sneak into the compound, which has its own guards.
In a Kabul hospital, Anifa Ahmadi sat by the bedside of her 17-year-old daughter Sima, who was wounded in the attack. Sima was in the front row of the classroom in the single-room building where the explosion occurred.
“I told her and told her, ‘Don’t go to school. We are under attack everywhere. No place is safe for us.’ But she said ‘No, no, no’.”
Sima appeared undeterred despite injuries to her legs and arms and said she would go back to school. “I won’t let anyone stop me, I will resist all terrorist attacks to have the future I want,” she said.
Nahida Rahimi, a doctor at Isteqlal Hospital, where some of the wounded are being treated, said a mother told her she had lost a son in Wednesday’s bombing after already losing another a year earlier in another suicide bombing, also in Kabul, that targeted Shias. “We were both crying,” the doctor said.
Elsewhere in Afghanistan, four policemen were killed and four were seriously wounded late Wednesday when they tried to defuse a car bomb they found in southern Kandahar province, according to Zia Durrani, provincial police spokesman.
Kandahar was the religious heartland of the Taliban during its five-year rule that ended with the 2001 invasion by US and Nato forces following the 9/11 attacks in the US.