A roadside mine killed 19 civilians and injured another five when it exploded in the southern Afghan province of Helmand on Wednesday, the provincial government said. The blast came a day after rare sectarian attacks in three Afghan cities killed 59 people, and refocused attention on the fragile Afghan security situation.
After Tuesday's attacks, the largest of which targeted a Shia Muslim shrine in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai cancelled a planned visit to Britain to return straight home, wiping out any residual optimism from an international conference about the future of Afghanistan, held on Monday in Germany.
"The reason for President Karzai's trip cancellation to Britain is the terrorist attacks on Ashura in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar which killed and wounded many participants," Karzai's office said in a statement. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), responsible for security across much of the country, says it is winning the war against the Taliban.
But if Tuesday's bombing sets a precedent for violence between the Sunni Muslim majority and the Shia minority, it would severely stretch army and police resources. At a funeral ceremony on Wednesday for victims of the attack, hundreds of Shia Muslims bore aloft the bodies of the dead, chanting that because they had been killed at a Muslim ceremony, they had died in the name of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). "We were sacrificed for you," they shouted.
The interior ministry has blamed "the Taliban and terrorists", without giving further details, while the Taliban strongly condemned the bombings. At the German conference, the Afghan government's Western backers, who have spent billions of dollars on the country since the US-led overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001, pledged to support the country beyond the end-2014 deadline for the withdrawal of foreign combat troops.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.