(Kabul) A member of the Sikh community was killed and seven others were injured on Saturday in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in the attack on a Sikh temple by gunmen, according to the Ministry of Interior .
Posted at 8:57
Around 6:30 a.m. (3 a.m. GMT), armed men entered this Sikh temple, located in the west of the city, attacking “a guard with grenades”, said the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Interior, Abdul Nafi Takor, in a statement.
A member of the Sikh community was killed and seven others were injured, according to the spokesman.
Taliban fighters quickly intervened on the scene and one of them was killed, the spokesman said, adding that “two assailants were killed during the intervention” by Taliban forces.
A few minutes after the attack, a car bomb exploded near the temple, causing no casualties, also indicated Abdul Nafi Takor.
“I heard gunshots and explosions coming from the [temple sikh] said Gurnam Singh, a Sikh community leader in Kabul.
“Usually at this time of the morning we have several Sikh worshipers coming to pray at the temple,” he added.
According to the Taliban, worshipers were able to escape through a back door of the building.
A fire broke out in the temple after the attack. Videos on social media showed a plume of black smoke rising above the site and gunfire can be heard.
Other videos show the walls and ceiling of the prayer hall blackened by fire.
A nearby building was also partly burned, and the windows of houses were blown out by the explosion of the car bomb, noted an AFP journalist.
Other Sikh temples in Kabul have been closed for security.
India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar condemned Saturday’s “cowardly attack” in a tweet.
This comes a few days after the visit of an Indian delegation to Kabul, to discuss with the Taliban government the distribution of humanitarian aid brought by Delhi to Afghanistan.
The possibility of reopening the Indian embassy in the Afghan capital has also been raised.
Already victims of attacks
New Delhi, which had close ties with the previous US-backed Afghan government, closed its mission in Kabul when the Taliban seized power on August 15.
About 200 Sikhs live in Afghanistan – an almost entirely Muslim country – compared to around half a million in the 1970s.
In recent years, the Afghan Sikh community has been the target of several attacks.
The deadliest took place in March 2020, when armed men stormed a temple in Kabul, killing at least 25 people.
The Islamic State jihadist group claimed responsibility for the attack.
IS had already targeted this minority during a suicide attack in July 2018 in Jalalabad, in the east of the country, killing 19 people.
Forty years of war, poverty and discrimination have caused the exodus of the Afghan Sikh community.
After the Taliban came to power in Kabul in August, nearly a hundred went into exile.
The number of attacks, often targeting minority religious communities, has decreased in the country since the arrival of the Taliban.
However, a series of bomb attacks, in which dozens of people were killed, hit the country at the end of April, during the month of Ramadan, and then at the end of May.
Most have been claimed by IS.
The Taliban are trying to minimize the threat from Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K), the regional branch of ISIS, and are waging a ruthless fight against the group, which they have been fighting for years.
They multiplied raids, particularly in the eastern province of Nangarhar, and arrested hundreds of men accused of being part of it.
They have claimed for a few months to have defeated EI-K, but analysts believe that the extremist group still constitutes the main security challenge for the new Afghan power.