GLOBAL news agencies reported that 34 people, mostly teenage students, were killed and 67 others injured in a bomb blast at an education centre in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul. A suicide bomber walked into the centre while teaching was underway and detonated his bomb belt. Many of those killed were getting extra tuition for university entrance exams. Taliban militants denied involvement in the attack. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Kabul blast but the attack bore the hallmark of Islamic State, which has conducted many same sorts of attacks on Shia targets earlier. Killing of innocent young students cannot be the way to establish supremacy. We condemn such brutal killings.
The IS has made it an explicit goal to eliminate all Shias from Afghanistan. This is a country where sectarian tensions have been relatively muted in the past but the relentless onslaught of IS attacks could change that. The main challenge for the Afghan government is to defuse tension by neutralizing this militant group. Some countries – Russia in particular – have talked to the Afghan Taliban to defeat the IS. Since the Taliban and IS are implacably opposed to each other, there is a line of thinking that Taliban should be used to defeat this deadlier threat.
In this part of the globe, once a group – be it defined by ethnicity or creed – acquires the status of a nation can become intolerant of all others. In Iraq, the key paradox was “identity politics”, which also became the American strategy for taking control over that country, but it at the same time contributed to shaping the identity of IS on sectarian lines.
Afghan government, weakened by a grinding war, is making similar mistakes and becomes vulnerable to polarizing forces. The ISIS is now highly desperate as it has lost territory in Syria and Iraq. So, the group’s fighters have looked for new areas in which to continue their activities. The IS’s ability to conduct sudden bloody slaughter should not be underestimated.
