Afghanistan: 19 Killed in Yet Another Explosion

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Nov 2: At least 19 people were killed and over 50 have been wounded in two explosions and gunshots at the entrance of the Afghanistan’s biggest military hospital in the capital city of Kabul on Tuesday.

Though no organization till the evening had taken responsibility for the attack, the militant group Islamist State, which lately has unleashed a series of bomb attacks particularly on the minority Shia Muslims, is believed to be behind the latest attack. Some media reports quoting eyewitnesses said a number of Islamic State fighters entered the hospital and clashed with security forces. In the recent days, at least 150 people were killed in two different suicide bomber attacks in Shia mosques in Afghanistan.

Eyewitnesses said they heard sounds of explosions near the 400-bed capacity Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan military hospital Kabul’s 10th district followed by the sound of gunfire. A Taliban official, on condition of anonymity said a suicide bomber and a gunman were behind the Kabul hospital attack.

Photographs shared by residents showed a plume of smoke over the area of the blasts near the former diplomatic zone in the Wazir Akbar Khan area in central Kabul. Taliban Interior ministry spokesman Qari Saeed Khosty said the explosions took place at the entrance of the 400-bed hospital. “Security forces are deployed to the area, there is no information about casualties,” he said on Twitter.

A health worker at the hospital, who managed to escape the site, said he heard a large explosion followed by a couple of minutes of gunfire. About ten minutes later, there was a second, larger explosion, he said. He said it was unclear whether the blasts and the gunfire were inside the sprawling hospital complex, the largest military hospital in Afghanistan.

The Islamic State, which has carried out a series of attacks on mosques and other targets since the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul in August, had attacked the same hospital in 2017 also killing more than 30 people.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf said on Tuesday that he would not attend a meeting of senior regional security officials being hosted by India to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

Besides China and Pakistan, regional countries such as Iran, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been invited to the meeting which is expected to be held in New Delhi on November 10. There are no plans to invite the Taliban to the meeting in line with the Indian government’s decision not to rush into recognising the current dispensation in Kabul.

“I will not be going,” Yusuf told a news briefing in Islamabad after a meeting with his Uzbekistan counterpart Victor Makhmudov. He was responding to a question from a reporter on whether he would attend the meeting in India. “A spoiler cannot try to be a peacemaker,” he added, in an apparent reference to India.

In response to another question, Yusuf said Pakistan has identified India as a hurdle to regional efforts to establish peace and security. Pakistan has said repeatedly that if India is prepared to move forward, then we will also be ready. But there are some prerequisites and an enabling environment for moving forward,” he said.

Among the prerequisites is addressing the Kashmir issue, he said. He added he didn’t see how the two sides could move forward in view of the Indian government’s policies and ideology. The Indian side had earlier planned to convene a similar meeting in April, with the participation of the former Ashraf Ghani government. However, this was scrapped due to the second wave of Coronavirus infections in India and the rapidly evolving situation in Afghanistan at the time.

India recently participated in a meeting of the Moscow Format that was also joined by senior Taliban leaders. Indian officials also held talks with the Taliban leaders on the margins of the meeting in Moscow. Iran also convened a meeting of regional countries to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, though India was not invited to the meet.

In another Afghanistan-related development, Amarullah Saleh, the former vice president of Afghanistan, has asked his former superior deposed president Ashraf Ghani to release the tapes of his conversations on the peace process with Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special representative to Afghanistan, who quit last month.

In a tweet, Saleh also demanded the release of tapes of Ghani’s conversations with other “relevant foreign diplomats,”  particularly from July and August. “I call on @ashrafghani to release the tapes ( esp Jul/Aug) of the conversations with Khalilzad & other relevant foreign diplomats on peace process to counter the growing propaganda that it was & is all the Afghan fault. I know these tapes exist & hope you have them. This z d time,” Saleh said in his tweet.

Ghani must do it to counter the growing propaganda that accuses the Afghan side of the collapse, Saleh said in a tweet. He also said in a subsequent tweet posted in Persian that Khalilzad’s deceptions became apparent, after which it was decided that other face-to-face and telephone conversations related to him with other foreign delegations should be recorded in secret. “Now that salt is sprinkled on the wounds of our nation every day, it is necessary to publish these conversations,” he said.

The tweets were in response to claims made by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a recent interview that Ghani was responsible for the collapse of the previous Afghan government.

“I talked with Ashraf Ghani on the telephone and he endorsed that a new government will be shaped led by the Taliban. We wanted an all-inclusive government in Afghanistan. Ashraf Ghani accepted that but the next day he fled Afghanistan,” Blinken had said. Khalilzad had also said previously that Afghanistan government collapsed since Afghan security forces did not show willingness to fight the Taliban. The insurgent group stormed to power in August following a military campaign which started just three months ago.