The Islamic State claimed a bombing that left at least 80 people dead Saturday at a peaceful demonstration in the Afghan capital of Kabul, raising fears that the group may be extending its reach beyond the country’s eastern pockets, where
The Islamic State claimed a bombing that left at least 80 people dead Saturday at a peaceful demonstration in the Afghan capital of Kabul, raising fears that the group may be extending its reach beyond the country’s eastern pockets, where it generally operates.
The Afghan Interior Ministry, in a statement, said the attack on thousands of Hazaras, an ethnic minority group staging the protest, had been a suicide mission.
“The attack was carried out by three suicide bombers: The first person carried out a blast, the second one failed at his detonation and the third terrorist was killed in shooting by the security forces,” the ministry said.
The second assailant was presumed to be at large, a security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss intelligence matters.
At least 231 people at the protest were wounded. The demonstrators had gathered in the west of Kabul to demand that a proposed electricity transmission line be routed through Bamian, a Hazara-dominated province in central Afghanistan.
The Islamic State, in a statement on the group’s Amaq News Agency, claimed the carnage as a “martyrdom attack on Shias.”
Officials saw the Islamic State’s first assault on the Afghan capital as retaliation for operations by Afghan ground forces and U.S. airstrikes that have intensified in recent weeks, targeting the group’s stronghold in eastern Nangarhar province.
Afghan security officials said that while Kabul remained under constant insurgent threat, they had no intelligence of a particular threat to the protest. After the attack, officials intercepted information from Islamic State commanders in the Achin district, the group’s base in eastern Afghanistan where villagers have been terrorized for months, congratulating each other for the carnage, the security official said.
President Ashraf Ghani, appearing on national television to announce a day of mourning, called the bombing a “cowardly attack on the freedoms of our citizens.” In meetings with religious leaders and his security team, he said the attack had been the work of the Islamic State.
Tadamichi Yamamoto, the U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, said the deliberate targeting of a large group of civilians amounted to a war crime.
“This incident is an outrage that cannot be justified,” Yamamoto said. “It is an attempt to spread terror amongst civilians and stifle the freedoms that Afghans have sacrificed so much to obtain.”
Much of the city had been under lockdown before the protesters came out early Saturday. Ghani’s government had stacked shipping containers to block routes to the presidential palace in anticipation of the demonstration.
The Hazaras have only in the past decade tried to shake off a long history of oppression. The protest leaders said the government remained rife with “systematic bias” against the Hazaras and had routed the electricity transmission line elsewhere, depriving the central Afghan region not only of electricity, but also of the roads and other infrastructure that would come with it.
The government has rejected the claims, saying the route of the transmission line was decided purely on technical grounds and that Bamian would still be provided with electricity. (Government officials, who said they had increased efforts to address the plight of central Afghanistan in the past two years, consider the protests manipulated by the political opposition.)
A sign printed on a piece of paper and held by an older woman proved hauntingly ominous: “Do not eliminate us,” it read.
