ISIS claimed responsibility Saturday for two suicide bombings that ripped through Kabul, killing at least 80 people and wounding hundreds during a protest by Shia minorities in the Afghan capital.
The attack came as thousands of ethnic Hazaras gathered at Demazang Square to demand that a major power line pass through their electricity-starved province of Bamiyan, one of the poorest areas of Afghanistan.
One suicide bomber was shot by police, presidential spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri said.
“We had intelligence over recent days and it was shared with the demonstration organizers, we shared our concerns because we knew that terrorists wanted to bring sectarianism to our community,” Chakhansuri said.
The protest march was largely peaceful before the explosions struck when the demonstrators sought to march on the presidential palace, waving flags and chanting slogans such as “death to discrimination.”
ISIS, whose presence had been confined to the eastern province of Nangarhar, claimed the bombings in a statement carried by its Amaaq news agency.
“Two fighters of the Islamic State detonated their explosive belts in a gathering of Shiites in Kabul,” Amaaq said.
If true, it would mark the first such attack by the jihadist group in Kabul, which had been on edge after another massive attack in April that left 64 people dead.
The National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency, said the attack was masterminded by Abu Ali, an ISIS commander in Nangarhar’s volatile Achin district.
US Army Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, condemned the attack.
“Our condolences go out to those who are affected by today’s attack. We strongly condemn the actions of Afghanistan’s enemies of peace and remain firmly committed to supporting our Afghan partners and the National Unity Government,” he said in a statement.
The attack was believed to have been aimed at stoking sectarian discord between Shiites and Sunnis. Since Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s, the country has largely been spared sectarian strife that is common in ISIS-infiltrated Pakistan, Iraq and Syria.
In a statement, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said he was “deeply saddened” by the massacre, adding that the casualties included security officials.
“Holding protests is the right of every citizen of Afghanistan… but terrorists entered the protests, and carried out explosions that martyred and wounded a number of citizens including members of security forces,” the presidential palace said.
The 500-kilovolt power line, which would connect the Central Asian nations of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan with electricity-hungry Afghanistan and Pakistan, was originally set to pass through the central province.
But the government rerouted it through the mountainous Salang pass north of Kabul, saying the shorter route would speed up the project and save millions of dollars.
Hazara leaders called the decision prejudiced against the 3 million-strong minority community, which has suffered a long history of oppression. Thousands were killed in the late 1990s by Al-Qaeda and the mainly Pashtun Sunni Taliban.
The Taliban, who have been waging a vicious insurgency against the Kabul government for 15 years, denied any involvement in the attack, Agence France-Presse reported. The Taliban regime was overthrown by the US invasion in 2001.
With Post Wires