KABUL: The death toll in a suicide bombing inside a classroom in Afghanistan’s capital has risen to 35, the United Nations said on Saturday, as Shiite Hazara women who bore the brunt of the attack staged a defiant protest against the “genocide” of their minority. community.
On Friday, a suicide attacker blew himself up in a study hall in Kabul as hundreds of pupils were taking tests in preparation for university entrance exams in the city’s Dasht-e-Barchi area.
The western neighborhood is a predominantly Shiite Muslim enclave and home to the minority Hazara community, a historically oppressed group that has been targeted in some of the South Asian country’s most brutal attacks in recent years.
“The latest casualty figures from the attack number at least 35 fatalities, with an additional 82 wounded,” the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) said in a statement.
More than 20 of those killed were girls and women, it added.
Unama’s casualty figure is higher than the toll Kabul authorities have given.
An interior ministry official told Agence France-Presse (AFP) anonymously on Saturday that 25 people were killed and 33 wounded in the attack on the Kaaj Higher Educational Center, updating an earlier toll of 20 killed and 27 wounded.
Since returning to power in August 2021, security has been a sensitive topic for the Taliban and the hardliners have often been keen to downplay attacks challenging their regime.
Meanwhile on Saturday, dozens of Hazara women defied a Taliban ban on rallies to protest the latest bloodshed in their community.
About 50 women chanted, “Stop Hazara genocide, it’s not a crime to be a Shiite,” as they marched past a hospital in Dasht-e-Barchi, where several of the bombing survivors were being treated.
Dressed in black hijabs and headscarves, the protesters carried banners that read “Stop killing Hazaras,” an AFP correspondent reported.
Witnesses have told AFP that the suicide attacker detonated in the women’s section of the gender-segregated study hall.
“Yesterday’s attack was against the Hazaras and Hazara girls,” protester Farzana Ahmadi, 19, told AFP. “We demand a stop to this genocide. We staged the protest to demand our rights.”
Protesters later gathered in front of the hospital and chanted slogans as dozens of heavily armed Taliban, some carrying rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, kept watch.
Since the hardline Taliban returned to power, women’s protests have become risky, with numerous demonstrators detained and rallies broken up by Taliban forces firing shots in the air.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack.
But the jihadist Islamic State (IS) group regards Shiites as heretics and has previously claimed attacks in the area targeting girls, schools and mosques.
The Taliban also regard the Hazara community as heathens, and rights groups often accuse the Islamists of targeting them during their 20-year insurgency against the former United States-backed government.
Since returning to power, the Taliban have pledged to protect minorities and clamp down on security threats.
But Amnesty International said Friday’s attack was “a shamefaced reminder of the inaptitude and utter failure of the Taliban, as de-facto authorities, to protect the people of Afghanistan.”
In May last year, before the Taliban’s return to power, at least 85 people — mainly girls — were killed and about 300 were wounded when three bombs exploded near their school in Dasht-e-Barchi.
Again, no group claimed responsibility, but a year earlier IS claimed a suicide attack on an educational center in the same area that killed 24.
The IS has emerged as a key security challenge for the Taliban, but officials claim their forces have defeated the jihadists.