Afghanistan: 63 dead in attacks on voter registration centres
At least 63
people killed in bombings targeting voter registration centres in Kabul and
Baghlan province, officials say.
Al Jazeera April 23, 2018
Bombings at voter registration centres
in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and in Baghlan province have killed at least 63
people and wounded more than a hundred others, health officials said.
At least 57 people were killed in
Kabul when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at the doorway of an
ID distribution centre in the city on Sunday, officials said.
Six more people were killed later in
the day in Baghlan's Pul-e-Khumri city, when their vehicle struck a roadside
bomb near another voting centre. All six were from the same family.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (ISIL,
also known as ISIS) group said it carried out the Kabul attack, but
no group has claimed responsibility for the Baghlan blast yet.
The Kabul bombing occured in the
Dasht-e-Barchi area, where many of the country's Shia Hazara
minority reside.
Among the victims were many women and
children, witnesses said.
"After I heard a bang, I rushed
to the site of the blast and, when I arrived at the scene, we helped many
wounded people by carrying them to hospital," Bashir Ahmad, a witness,
said.
"Many of the victims were women
and children who were here to get their identity cards and register for
elections," Ahmad added.
Wahid Majro, spokesman for the public
health ministry, said five small children and 21 women were killed in the
attack. The toll could still rise, he told the Associated Press news
agency.
In a separate development on Sunday, a
traffic incident reportedly involving a convoy of foreign forces killed a child
near the US embassy in Kabul, prompting protests in the area. Witnesses
reported heavy gunfire near the embassy.
October elections
Attacks have multiplied in recent days
in advance of the long-delayed parliamentary and district council
elections scheduled for October 20 this year.
Last week, a voter registration centre
was attacked in Ghor province, according to Tolonews, a local news website.
In that attack, unidentified gunmen,
which a police spokesperson said belonged to the Taliban,
kidnapped two police officers on site as well as three IEC workers.
Al Jazeera's Abdullah Shahood,
reporting from Kabul, said there was uncertainty about the government's ability
to secure the polls.
"Elections are scheduled to be
held in many areas that are under Taliban control. There is no chance that free
polls could be held there, even as the government says it is trying to
implement law and order there to allow people to vote and exercise their
constitutional right," Shahood said.
Voter registration offices opened just
last week as part of the long process to get Afghans properly registered for
the October polls.
The Independent Election Commission
(IEC) says it hopes as many as 15 million people will register for the polls,
but the election commissioner admits registration turnout so far has been low.
President Ashraf Ghani issued a
statement condemning the attack and said it "cannot divert us from our
aims or weaken this national democratic process".
Tadamichi Yamamoto, the UN's top
official in the country, condemned the attack, saying he "feels a deep
sense of revulsion".
"Compounding the callous
disregard for the lives of civilians, the killing appears to be part of a
wholly unacceptable effort by extremists to deter Afghan citizens from carrying
out their constitutional right to take part in elections," he said in
a statement.
My response:
The scene is one that many know well.
Attacks, whether for belief or duty, that often come at the cost of the innocent
as the article highlights the number of women and children harmed in the attack.
A land that has already seen so much is thrown into turmoil because of coming
elections like so many other nations. This attack seems specifically designed
to inspire fear, though maybe all of them achieve that purpose. When the
article mentioned that the registration turnout so far has been low I was not
really surprised. People who would have possibly voted are held back from
living in a Taliban controlled area and now there is even more fear than there was before.
In the recent attacks I found it interesting how both ISIS and the Taliban have
come into play in Afghanistan. Not having heard a lot about the Taliban
recently I did not know whether they still operated in that area or not. I
guess that I kept hearing all that was happening in Afghanistan as a thing of
history, but clearly the country still experiences turmoil as the conflict
continues. The audience seems to me to be quite broad, as news spreads and
people around the world hear about the attack. However I'm concerned that many
people, often myself included, can hear of another attack and see it as a list
of numbers. I could also see that many
people would be interested in seeing what the government is going to do to
ensure this from happening again. Though the article addresses the government's
response, it was a more of a condemnation of the act and a commitment to an
idea than a commitment to action. Maybe that's what their people need right
now, to know that they will give up, but it did not really seem so concrete to
me.
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