Kabul
Four roadside bombs detonated in less than 90 minutes Monday in a northern district of Afghanistan’s capital, wounding four civilians including a child, police said.
Militants have carried out several roadside bombings and rocket attacks in Kabul and other parts of the country in recent weeks, but Monday morning’s blasts appeared to be the first coordinated effort for some months.
Kabul police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz said a clearance team was at the site of the blasts, which had not yet been claimed by any group.
The bombings were in an area where Afghanistan’s intelligence agency recently busted a joint the militant Islamic State-Haqqani network cell accused of carrying out several attacks.
Meanwhile, the Afghan government announced on Monday that its security forces have arrested Daesh’s South Asia chief Abu Omar Khorasani and two other key leaders of the group.
The militant group’s head of South Asia, Abu Omar Khorasani, was arrested in Kabul alongside the group’s spy chief and public relations officer, the General Directorate of National Security and Interior Ministry said in a statement.
“NDS will continue its comprehensive and targeted operations to hunt down senior leaders of regional terrorist groups and destroy the joint hubs of these terrorist networks,” the statement said.
Dash in South Asia is mainly focused on a small presence in Afghanistan, largely in the north, though it has waged high profile attacks further south in the capital.
Afghan security forces arrested eight members of a network grouping Islamic State and Haqqani militants responsible for bloody attacks in the capital including on Sikh worshippers, the country’s security agency said last Wednesday.
The ongoing violence underscored the challenges to securing lasting peace in Afghanistan even after the United States signed a troop withdrawal agreement with the militant Taliban in February.
The Taliban, which says it opposes Daesh and has fought the group, has since held off on large-scale attacks on foreign forces or in major centres, though it has continued attacking Afghan security forces throughout the provinces.
Clashes in eastern Laghman province between security forces and the Taliban killed six security force members and wounded five, according to Haroon Yousufzai, a local military spokesman. The ministry of defence said the Taliban also suffered heavy casualties. — AFP
