Twenty-nine participants in a political rally were killed this Friday in Kabul in an attack claimed by Daesh. It is the first such attack since the agreement between the Taliban and the United States.
Two jihadists "targeted a gathering of apostates in the city of Kabul with automatic weapons, grenades and rocket launchers (…)", indicated Daesh via the Telegram application. Some "29 people, including women, were killed and 61 injured," said Nasrat Rahimi, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, on WhatsApp messaging.
The two assailants shot dead
On a video obtained by AFP, Karim Khalili, the head of the Afghan High Council for Peace, a public body, sees his speech interrupted by a heavy fire, causing howls in the crowd. The attack was aimed at a ceremony commemorating the death of Abdul Ali Mazari, a politician from the Hazara minority, whose members are overwhelmingly Shiite in a largely Sunni Afghanistan.
Photos on social networks show alignments of bodies, some of which have their faces covered with a piece of cloth, a sign that they are corpses. Many members of the Afghan political elite were present, including the Afghan chief executive Abdullah Abdullah, who said he had won the presidential election in September even if the official results gave him losers. The two attackers, who had opened fire from a construction site near the event, were shot dead, he added.
A badly launched interafghan summit
President Ashraf Ghani denounced "a crime against humanity" in a press release. The Taliban have denied responsibility for the attack, which underscores the level of insecurity that Afghanistan faces, while the United States pledged on February 29 in Qatar to force all foreign forces to withdraw from the country under 14 months, in exchange for guarantees from the Taliban.
The incident comes less than a week after the Doha agreement was signed on February 29. A partial truce instituted at Washington's request on February 22 was lifted on Monday by the Taliban. They have since multiplied attacks against Afghan security forces, highlighting the difficulty of dialogue between the insurgents and the government in Kabul, another condition of the Doha agreement.
The inter-Afghan meeting, scheduled for March 10 in Oslo, seems badly started, while Afghan President Ashraf Ghani rejects one of the main points of this agreement: the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for that of up to 1,000 members of the Afghan forces in the hands of the insurgents.
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