At least 80 people have died and a hundred have been injured this Friday in Afghanistan in a suicide attack against a Shiite mosque in Kunduz, in the northeast of the country. The attack comes five days after an attack in Kabul on another mosque claimed by Islamic State terrorists.
Until now, the Kunduz attack has not been claimed. It is the deadliest terrorist attack in Afghanistan since the departure of the last US and foreign soldiers on August 30, reports Euronews .
The explosion took place during prayers on Friday and, as confirmed by a local official source to CBS , it would be a bomb carried by a child in a backpack. The minor would have entered the mosque under the guise of a shoe shine.
“At least 26 bodies have been transferred to the hospital in the provincial center,” said the CBS Afghanistan correspondent Ahmad Mujtar on his Twitter account. The injured have been transferred to Médecins Sans Frontières centers and private homes.
The death figures for the moment are provisional. At Kunduz Central Hospital, a doctor said they had received 35 bodies and more than 50 wounded.
For its part, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has taken note of additional information that brings the total number of deaths and injuries to around one hundred before condemning the attack, which is part of “a disturbing pattern of violence” to This is the third deadly attack this week, apparently directed against a religious institution in the country.
The spokesman for the Taliban and Afghan Deputy Minister of Information, Zabihulá Mujahid, confirmed the event in his official account on the social network Twitter and stated that “several compatriots have been martyred or injured.”
He also stressed that “the special forces have arrived at the scene and are investigating”, without giving a death toll. Videos circulating on social networks show several bodies inside the mosque, which has suffered serious material damage.
For now, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, although the Islamic State has claimed to be behind several attacks in recent weeks, including the one perpetrated on Sunday at a Kabul mosque during the funeral of Mujahid’s mother.
Mujahid himself denied this Friday that the jihadist group poses “a threat” and stressed that it is rather “a headache.” “It generates headaches in some places but is immediately eliminated after each incident,” he valued.
The Taliban authorities have announced in recent weeks the death and arrest of several alleged members of the jihadist group, which considers the Taliban traitors to the orthodoxy of ‘sharia’ or Islamic law and advocates a much harsher interpretation.
