Taliban fighters stormed the culture ministry in the heart of Kabul, killing five people in an attack the Afghan president said aimed to derail the government’s new effort to draw militants into a peace process and end a seven-year insurgency.
The fighters shot their way inside the building, where one of the militants blew himself up, a police guard wounded in Thursday’s blast said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and gave a similar account.
PHOTO: AP
“Our enemies are trying to undermine the recent efforts by the government for a peaceful solution to end the violence,” US-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a terse statement.
The attack came three days after senior Afghan and Pakistani officials decided at a meeting held in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, to reach out to the Taliban militants to propose talks on ending the insurgency.
The meeting was part of a process initiated in 2006 by US President George W. Bush and his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts.
The Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan said the two sides recently had contacts in Saudi Arabia. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the incoming head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, have both endorsed the efforts.
Karzai’s remarks suggested elements of the Taliban wanted to sabotage the nascent reconciliation efforts.
While the Taliban has regularly used suicide attacks against Afghan and foreign forces around the country, they rarely strike in Kabul.
Amir Mohammad, a police guard who was wounded in Thursday’s attack, said three assailants opened fire on police guards outside the Ministry of Information and Culture before entering its cavernous hall where one of them blew himself up.
“There were three people. They were running. They opened fire on our guard first and then they entered” the building, Mohammad told reporters from his hospital bed in Kabul.
The force of the blast flung Mohammed onto the street, where he lay unconscious among shattered glass and pools of blood.
Five people were killed in the attack, including a policeman, three ministry employees and a civilian, the Interior Ministry said.
An additional 21 were wounded, said Abdul Fahim, the spokesman for the Health Ministry, which supervises the hospitals where the injured were taken.
The culture ministry was a pointed target. Before the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban in late 2001 for sheltering al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the regime banned art, secular music and television, vandalized the National Museum of Afghanistan and destroyed artwork or statues deemed idolatrous or anti-Muslim.
Taliban fighters also blew up two giant statues of Buddha, cultural treasures that had graced the Silk Road town of Bamiyan for 1,500 years.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said three militants stormed the building by throwing hand grenades at the guards at the main gate.
A man named Naqibullah from the eastern Khost Province carried out the suicide attack, Mujahid said. The other two men fled, he said.
Though attacks in the capital are rare, on July 7 a suicide attacker killed more than 60 outside the Indian embassy in Kabul.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was