Returning to power in mid-August in Afghanistan, the Taliban, proud to have put an end to a violence of which they were the main authors, discover, in turn, the horrors of a country confronted with repeated attacks. At least 55 people, according to provisional evidence, were killed on Friday, October 8, in a suicide bombing carried out during the weekly great prayer in a Shiite mosque in Kunduz, in northeastern Afghanistan. The attack, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) organization, also left more than a hundred injured. The death toll threatens to be one of the heaviest recorded since the departure of foreign troops on August 30.
On this day of rest, more than 300 people flocked to Friday prayers at the Gozar-e-Sayed Abad Mosque in the heart of the Shiite district of Khan Abad Bandar in Kunduz. According to the first observations, the suicide bomber slipped among the faithful before detonating the explosives he was carrying on him, explained the Taliban Ministry of Culture and Information. The explosion, sending thick black smoke into the city sky, spared every window and riddled the walls of the mosque with shards. A movement of panic then spread throughout the neighborhood.
Upon their arrival, the emergency services discovered intermingled lifeless bodies. An incessant ballet of ambulances began to take the many victims to Kunduz central hospital or to the local Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic – the latter said it had taken care of twenty dead and more than eighty – ten injured. The green carpet of the mosque, stained with blood and strewn with torn clothes, bore the scars of violence that deliberately targeted the Shiite Hazara minority, which represents between 10% and 20% of the Afghan population.
Particularly deadly attacks
ISIS claimed responsibility for the August 26 attack near Kabul airport, which left 182 people dead, including 13 American soldiers. On May 8, in the capital, more than 50 Hazara high school girls were killed in an attack carried out by ISIS, and around 100 people were injured. According to the interior ministry, three successive explosions rang out in front of the school located in the Shiite district of the city and left no chance for young girls aged 13 to 18 who tried to flee after the first detonation. of a car bomb.
ISIS carried out the deadliest attacks in the country between 2018 and 2021, targeting mosques, hospitals and public places like Kabul University. The organization attacks, in particular, the Hazara Shiite minority that it considers to be “Heretics”. According to the UN, which submitted a report on this group to the Security Council in July, the number of ISIS in the country is estimated at “Between 500 and a few thousand combatants”. This organization would have, moreover, tied “Informal contacts with other terrorist groups, notably in Pakistan, which regularly attack Pakistani posts along the border”.
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