(Kabul) At least 19 people were killed on Friday in Kabul in a suicide attack, which struck mostly girls, against a training center full of students located in a neighborhood home to the minority Hazara community.
Posted at 6:25 a.m.
“Students were preparing for an exam when a suicide bomber blew himself up in this educational center. Unfortunately, 19 people died and 27 others were injured,” said Khalid Zadran, Afghan police spokesman.
“Most of the victims are girls,” testified to AFP a student on the spot at the time of the explosion, without being able to specify whether these victims had been killed or injured.
He added that there were about 600 people in the class at this training center which prepares students, aged 18 and above, for their university entrance exams. Girls and boys were in the same room, but each on one side of the room.
Most of the victims transported to hospitals are women, also noted an AFP journalist.
“There was a loud explosion and then chaos, many students, boys and girls tried to escape from the building,” a trader who requested anonymity told AFP. “It was a horrible scene. Everyone was so scared”.
The roof of the classroom collapsed completely, the doors and windows were shattered by the blast, AFP noted. At midday, municipal employees were trying to clean the floor covered in bloodstains.
This attack, which once again targets the world of education, took place in the district of Dasht-e-Barchi, in the west of Kabul, a predominantly Shiite Muslim area where the minority Hazara community lives, the scene of some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan.
Education is an extremely sensitive issue in this predominantly Sunni country, with the Taliban preventing many girls from returning to secondary education (middle and high school). On the other hand, female students are admitted to university, but their number should decrease over the years, for lack of having been to college and high school.
The Islamic State (IS), another Sunni group with which the Taliban nevertheless harbors deep enmity and ideological differences, also opposes the education of women and girls. IS, the main threat of the Taliban regime, has claimed responsibility for several attacks in recent months. That of Friday was not claimed.
Security teams were deployed to the scene as families streamed into the various hospitals in tears, looking for their loved ones.
In at least one hospital, however, the Taliban forced the families to leave the site, fearing that a new attack would be launched in the middle of the crowd.
Lists of the dead or injured were hung at the entrance to the hospitals where the ambulances converged, AFP noted.
“Heinous act”
“We didn’t find her here,” worried a young woman in distress, looking for her 19-year-old sister in one of them. “We call her but she doesn’t answer,” the young woman is in despair.
“Attacking civilian targets proves the enemy’s inhuman cruelty and lack of moral standards,” Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Nafy Takor said earlier.
On April 20, at least six people were killed and 24 injured in two explosions that hit a school for boys in the same district in the west of the capital.
Dasht-e-Barchi has been heavily hit in recent years. Since the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021, several attacks claimed by EI-K, the regional branch of the jihadist group Islamic State, which considers the Hazaras to be heretics.
In May 2021, a series of explosions also occurred in front of a school for girls in the same district, killing 85 people, mostly high school girls, and injuring more than 300.
IS, which had already claimed responsibility for an attack in October 2020 against an educational center (24 dead) in the same area, is strongly suspected of having carried out this attack.
The Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 ended two decades of war in Afghanistan and led to a significant reduction in violence, but security has begun to deteriorate in recent months.
In a tweet, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) on Friday condemned a “heinous act” and stressed that “security is deteriorating in Afghanistan”.
The attack is “a shameful reminder of the Taliban’s inability and total failure” to protect the Afghan population, Amnesty International said.
“Urgent measures must be taken to ensure the safety” of the inhabitants “in particular the members of the minority communities”, insisted the NGO.