Attack on hospital spurs order to resume Afghan offensive
KABUL — The woman, unmoving, lay slouched against the wall of a hospital room, blood splattered on her face mask. In her arms: a tiny, swaddled baby.
The scene was one of many such images to emerge Tuesday from a busy Doctors Without Borders maternity ward in Kabul after gunmen stormed in and battled security forces for nearly four hours. Sixteen people, including two newborns, were killed.
The same day, in the country’s east, a suicide bomber killed 24 people at a funeral.
The attacks cap a deadly sixweek period since the Taliban and the United States signed a deal that leaders hoped would lead to a reduction in violence and the start of intra-Afghan talks. Instead, a spike in attacks by the Taliban and other militant groups such as the Islamic State have put the fragile chance for peace in jeopardy.
The Taliban denied responsibility for Tuesday’s bloodshed, but Afghan officials appeared to connect the two attacks with rising Taliban violence in other parts of the country. Hours after the siege at the hospital ended, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani ordered his armed forces to resume offensive operations against the Taliban.
“This is not peace, nor its beginnings,” Afghanistan’s national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib said in a post on Twitter, referring to Tuesday’s violence. He said that the Taliban “subcontracted their terror to other entities” and that there is “little point in continuing to engage Taliban in ‘peace talks.’ ”
Those peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government were supposed to begin more than two months ago but have been plagued by delays. Key negotiations over a controversial prisoner swap collapsed in April, and while both sides have continued to release prisoners unilaterally, they don’t appear any closer to direct talks.
In a statement Tuesday, Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo condemned the hospital attack as “an act of sheer evil” and urged both sides to find a solution to the political crisis.
“The Taliban and the Afghan government should cooperate to bring the perpetrators to justice,” the statement read. “As long as there is no sustained reduction in violence and insufficient progress toward a negotiated political settlement, Afghanistan will remain vulnerable to terrorism.”
The public text of the U.S.-Taliban peace deal does not include a commitment from the Taliban to reduce attacks against Afghan forces, but U.S. officials have said all sides verbally agreed to bring overall violence down by as much as 80 percent.
The Taliban released a statement condemning Tuesday’s attacks and calling Ghani’s announcement a “declaration of war.”
Similar to previous attacks, the gunmen in the hospital Tuesday held off Afghan security forces for hours. More than 100 patients, family members, doctors and nurses were evacuated from the hospital during the attack. About four hours after the siege began, Afghan forces declared the building cleared.
Abdul Habib Faizy, the hospital’s nursing manager, said he could hear the gunmen changing their weapons’ magazines outside the safe room where he hid.
“It was a horrific situation,” he said. “We were waiting to die every moment. Who would kill mothers who had just given birth and their newborn babies?
“They are the enemies of humanity.”