KABUL/TEHRAN — A Taliban official says a bombing at a mosque and religious school in northern Afghanistan on Friday killed at least 33 people, including students of a religious school.
Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted news of the devastating bombing in the town of Imam Saheb, in Kunduz Province, saying it also wounded another 43 people, many of them students.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Afghanistan’s Daesh affiliate on Thursday claimed a series of earlier bombings, the worst of which was an attack on a Shia mosque in northern Mazar-e-Sharif that martyred at least 10 of Afghanistan’s minority Shia Muslim worshipers and wounded scores more.
The deadliest of the three bombings on Thursday exploded inside a Shia mosque in northern Mazar-e-Sharif. Hospital officials say at least 12 people were martyred and as many as 40 were hurt.
Earlier Thursday, a roadside bomb exploded near a boys school in the Afghan capital of Kabul, injuring two children in the city’s predominately Shia neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi. A third bomb in northern Kunduz injured 11 mechanics working for the country’s Taliban rulers.
The Daesh-K had been relatively inactive in Afghanistan since last November, but in recent weeks have stepped up its attacks in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, taking aim at Shia Muslim communities.
Earlier this month two bombs exploded in Kabul’s Shia neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi, killing at least seven students and wounding several others.
The Daesh-K established its headquarters in eastern Afghanistan in 2014 and have been blamed for some of the worst attacks in Afghanistan, including a vicious assault on a maternity hospital and at a school that killed more than 80 girls in 2021, months before the Taliban took power.
In recent months, the Daesh-K has also stepped up attacks in neighboring Pakistan, targeting a Shia mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar in March. More than 65 worshippers were martyred. The upstart affiliate has also claimed several deadly attacks against Pakistan’s military.
“Behind these terrorist acts, which are clearly aimed at escalating violence and creating a civil war in Afghanistan, the evil hand of Western elements and intelligence services is evident, which have launched a new proxy war by mobilizing and organizing takfiri terrorist groups especially in the country’s north,” Nour News, affiliated to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote on Saturday.

The outlet cited “reliable information” indicating that the recent terrorist operations in Afghanistan, along with non-stop efforts to stoke strife between the people of Iran and Afghanistan and the start of terrorist operations by Daesh with U.S. support are linked to a joint Washington-London strategy to trigger a new hybrid war with the aim of creating insecurity and instability in the region.
“The Anglo-American hypocrisy line, which sees its hands cut off from Afghanistan in the wake of the humiliating exit of U.S. and NATO troops after a 20-year occupation, continues its hostile policies and seeks to maintain its ominous shadow in the region by stoking strife,” it said.
On the other side of the Islamic world, the occupied Palestinian territories are witnessing the frequent encroachment of the Zionist regime on holy places such as Al-Aqsa Mosque and its bid to crush a new intifada, Nour News said.
“The violent behavior of the desperate Naftali Bennett regime against Palestinian Muslims in Gaza, the West Bank and the 1948 regions is also carried out with the green light of the supporters of the fake Zionist regime, especially the United States and Britain,” it said.
“A notable point in the violence against Muslims, both Shias and Sunnis, is the widespread and severe censorship of the Western-Zionist media empire, which seeks to magnify developments in Ukraine with double standards and minimize the atrocities committed against Muslims,” it added.