By Mohammad Yunus Yawar
KABUL, Aug 18 (Reuters) – An explosion at an education centre in Kabul injured at least 42 children on Monday, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said on Tuesday, calling for an “investigation to establish the circumstances of this incident.”
The blast occurred on Monday evening in Dasht-e-Barchi, a Kabul neighbourhood that is predominantly home to Afghanistan’s Hazara and Shi’ite minority communities. It has frequently been the target of Sunni Islamist militants — including Islamic State — in the past.
Reuters was unable to independently verify what caused the explosion.
The Taliban-run Kabul police department did not respond to a request for comment.
A Kabul hospital that admitted at least 35 of the injured students said all patients were between the ages of 10 and 14.
“All the patients were suffering from shrapnel injuries, with at least three of them requiring surgical care,” Dejan Panic, the Afghanistan Country Director for the EMERGENCY hospital in Kabul, was quoted as saying in a statement.
The explosion’s location led some to condemn it as a targeted attack.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, condemned the incident as a “heinous attack” in a post on social media.
The European Union’s mission in Afghanistan also said in a post on social media that “deliberate attacks on children & education centers are unacceptable.”
Dasht-e-Barchi, a densely populated neighbourhood in western Kabul with a large Hazara community, has been repeatedly hit by attacks in recent years, many of which have targeted civilians, students and members of the Shi’ite minority.
In May 2021, a school attack killed at least 85 people and wounded hundreds. The vast majority of victims were girls and women.
In September 2022, a suicide attacker targeted a tutoring centre during a practice university entrance examination, killing at least 19 people — many of them also young women and teenage girls.
(Reporting by Mohammad Yunus Yawar in Kabul; Editing by Rick Noack and Hugh Lawson)
