Afghan Taliban officials said Thursday that at least 21 people were killed in a bomb that exploded overnight inside a mosque in Kabul.
Police Khalid Zadran, a spokesman for the Afghan capital, told VOA that at least 33 worshipers were also injured. He said he blew down the Siddiqiyah Mosque in the Kha Khanna district in the north of the city during a night of prayers.
The famous Afghan scholar and Sufi prayer leader Amir Mohammad Qabri, he is a preacher of Islam, is said to be among the dead.
The Italian-run Emergency 7 Charity Hospital in Kabul said in a statement that two of his 27 victims who were transported to the facility from the blast site had died and a third. He said the patient died in the emergency room. Five children, including a 7-year-old, were reportedly injured.
Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman for the ruling Taliban, said, "The perpetrators of such crimes will soon be brought to justice and punished," adding that the deadly condemned the attack.
No one was attacked immediately and responsibly. But suspicion fell on the self-proclaimed Islamic State terrorist group, which denounces Muslims who practice Sufism as polytheistic.
Since the Taliban seized power a year before him, the Islamic State Khorasan province, or his ISIS-K, the Afghan branch of the Islamic State group, has stepped up its attacks in Afghanistan. there is The terrorist organization carried out bomb attacks against Taliban fighters and civilians, especially Afghan his Shia Muslims, a minority whom they accuse as apostates.
Last week, a suicide bomber from the Islamic State group killed a prominent and highly respected Taliban scholar inside his Islamic seminary or madrasah in Kabul.
The Taliban repeatedly claim that military operations have weakened ISIS-K. But critics have cast doubt on these claims in the wake of recent high-profile attacks in Kabul and deadly bombings elsewhere in Afghanistan.
