An injured student is evacuated after a bomb exploded outside a school in Kabul on May 8, 2021. – Rahmat Gul / AP / SIPA
Bomb attacks have once again brought particular mourning to Afghanistan. The last record of the explosions, Saturday; Near a girls’ school in a district of Kabul now stands at 50 dead, the Interior Ministry said on Sunday.
Ministry spokesman Tareq Arian said a car bomb exploded outside the Sayed Al-Shuhada school, and two more bombs exploded as panicked students rushed outside. He added that more than a hundred people were injured and most of the victims are female students.
Start of burials
The explosions occurred in the Hazara neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi, in the western part of the Afghan capital. It is mainly populated by Hazara Shiites, often targeted by Sunni Islamist groups. The attacks also took place as residents were shopping for the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr, which will mark the end of Ramadan next week. Families began burying the victims on Sunday at a hilltop site known as the “Martyrs’ Cemetery”.
The attack has not been claimed, but Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has accused the Taliban of being responsible. “This group of savages does not have the capacity to confront the security forces on the battlefield, so instead they barbarically attack public buildings and girls’ schools,” he said. He denounces.
The American departure is approaching
The Taliban, for their part, denied being involved, saying they had not committed attacks in Kabul since February 2020, when they signed an agreement with the United States paving the way for peace talks and the withdrawal of the latter. American troops. However, they are engaged in daily fighting with Afghan forces in the hinterland even as the US military is reducing its presence.
These attacks come when the United States was supposed to have withdrawn the 2,500 American soldiers still present on May 1. This was the deadline chosen during the agreement signed in February 2020 in Qatar with the Taliban by the former administration of Donald Trump. But Washington postponed this date to September 11, the 20th anniversary of the 2001 attacks. The highest American diplomat in Kabul, Ross Wilson, did not fail to react by qualifying the explosions on Saturday as “odious. “.