KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A roadside bomb wounded at least two children Thursday in the Afghan capital of Kabul, a police official said.
Kabul police spokesman, Khalid Zadran, said in a tweet that the explosives went off in the median strip of a road in a western area of Kabul in a mostly Shiite neighborhood. Two days earlier in the same area, multiple explosions targeting educational institutions killed at least six people, mostly children, and wounded 17 others.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for Thursday’s explosion.
Another explosion in northern Balkh province targeted a Shiite mosque, Zabihullah Noorani, the provincial information and culture department head told the Associated Press.
There were no immediate details on the number of casualties. Noorani said Taliban security forces had reached the area to investigate.
Advocates for the minority Hazaras called for a stop to the killings. Hazaras, who make up around 9% of the population of Afghanistan’s 36 million people, stand alone in being targeted because of their ethnicity — distinct from the other ethnic groups, such as Tajik and Uzbek and the Pashtun majority — and their religion. Most Hazaras are Shiite Muslims, despised by Sunni Muslim radicals like the Islamic State group, and discriminated against by many in the Sunni-majority country.
The Islamic State affiliate known as IS in Khorasan Province, or IS-K, has previously targeted schools, particularly in the Shiite-dominated Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood. In May last year, months before the Taliban took power in Kabul, more than 60 children, mostly girls, were killed when two bombs were detonated outside their school, also in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood.
Dasht-e-Barchi and other parts of western Kabul are houses to the Shiite minorities of Afghanistan which have mostly been targeted by the Islamic State affiliate loyalists, however, no one has claimed credit for the recent explosions.
