Two people were killed and four wounded in separate bomb explosions Friday in Kabul, the Taliban government said, as the Islamic State extremist group claimed responsibility.
“Two civilians have been killed and three others were wounded” when a bomb exploded on a minibus in the Dasht-e-Barchi district of the Afghan capital, the Taliban s interior ministry spokesman Sayed Khosti told reporters.
“In another explosion in the same area, one woman was wounded,” he added, specifying that the second blast was also a bomb.
Dasht-e-Barchi is largely populated by the mostly Shiite Hazara community, who for years have been the target of violence by the jihadist Islamic State-Khorasan group.
The IS-K late Friday claimed responsibility for what it said were three explosions targeting buses carrying Shiites.
The bombings ended up “destroying the buses and killing and wounding dozens of them,” according to the group s message translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, a platform that monitors jihadist activity.
Broken glass and damaged structures were seen on and near the street where one of the explosions occurred.
In November, a similar bomb attack on a minibus in Dasht-e-Barchi killed two people and wounded five others, in an attack that also was claimed by IS-K.
The group — an offshoot of the Islamic State that established a so-called caliphate across swathes of Iraq and Syria from 2014 until 2017 — claimed responsibility for an October 15 suicide bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Kandahar that killed at least 60 people and injured scores more.
That attack came a week after another deadly mosque blast claimed by the group in northern Kunduz province killed over 60 people.
The Taliban has vowed to crush this rival Sunni extremist group, launching crackdowns against hideouts used by the jihadists, especially in the country s south and east.
Friday s bus bombings included the first fatal attack reported by the Taliban for several weeks.
But Kabul has been hit by repeated blasts lately that the Taliban say have been non-fatal.
The Taliban came back to power after a two decade absence on August 15, when the previous government s resistance melted amid the final stages of a US military withdrawal from the country.
The Taliban s first stint in power lasted from 1996 to 2001, before a US invasion late that year toppled the Islamists—AFP
