KABUL, Afghanistan — Explosions targeting educational institutions killed at least six people, including students, and wounded 17 Tuesday in a mostly Shiite neighborhood of Afghanistan’s capital city, police said.
The blasts, which happened in rapid succession, were being investigated and more casualties were feared, according to Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran and the city’s Emergency Hospital. Some of the injured had suffered serious injuries and were being released.
Explosions took place at the Abdul Rahim Shaheed Secondary School, and nearby the Mumtaz Education Center about a kilometer (miles) from each other in Dasht-e-Barchi’s predominately Shiite Muslim neighbourhood. No immediate reports were made of any casualties at this education center.
In the narrow streets leading to the school, guards said that they witnessed 10 deaths. Inside the school, an Associated Press video journalist saw walls splattered with blood, burned notebooks and children’s shoes.
The AP interviewed several private guards, who refused to reveal their identities because they were afraid of being rescinded by the Taliban security force.
Witnesses claimed that it was a suicide bomber who attacked the school, which is capable of housing up to 1,000 students. It wasn’t immediately clear how many children were in the school at the time of the explosion.
The school is teaching students only until grade 6 after Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban rulers went back on a promise to allow all girls to attend school.
However, no one claimed immediate responsibility. The area has been targeted in the past by Afghanistan’s deadly Islamic State affiliate, which reviles Shiite Muslims as heretics.
Save the Children in Afghanistan issued a statement “strongly condemning ” the attack and saying “no school should be deliberately targeted, and no child should fear physical harm at or on the way to school.”
The U.N.’s high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said on Twitter he joined the world body’s special representative for Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, in offering condolences to families of the victims. He said the attack against the school was “horrific and cowardly.”
IS-K (the Islamic State affiliate in Khorasan Province) has attacked schools before, especially in Dasht-e-Barchi’s Shiite-dominated area. Two bombs detonated in front of their school in Dasht-e-Barchi in May, just months after the Taliban were elected to power in Kabul killed more than 60 kids, most of them girls.
IS has presented the biggest security challenge to the country’s Taliban rulers, who swept into Kabul last August as the United States ended its 20-year war.
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Reporting by Tameem Ashgar and Rahim Faiez, both Associated Press journalists from Islamabad and Geir Mulson in Berlin.
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