Mohammad Dawood Muzammil and another person died while many were reportedly injured in the 9:30am blast that was not owned up by any group so far. But suspicion fell on Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Islamic State regional affiliate that has become the biggest security challenge for the Taliban authorities and is also known as Daesh.
Muzammil had led the fight against ISKP in his previous stint asgovernor of the eastern province of Nangarhar before being moved to Balkh in October last year.
Thursday’s strike came a day after Muzammil had, according to an Afghan government statement, hosted the country’s two Deputy Prime Ministers and other officials to review a major irrigation project in the area.
That meeting had coincided with local Taliban authorities’ claims that they had killed eight “rebels and kidnappers” in Mazar-e-Sharif while not specifying which “rebel” group they were allegedly affiliated to.
“The suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vest,” an official source told TOI from Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital, Thursday. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, tweeted that the governor had been “martyred in an explosion by the enemies of Islam” while adding that an investigation is underway.
ISKP carried out a string of attacks against locals, specifically members of the minority Shia community, as well as foreigners and foreign interests. It had claimed a suicide blast this January that killed at least 10 people near Kabul’s foreign ministry.
Before that, ISKP had targeted a hotel last December in Kabul where more than 30 Chinese nationals were staying. The attack had left five of the Chinese wounded and prompted a rattled Beijing to call back its citizens from the war-ravaged country.
On December 2, 2022, the group had attacked Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul in a failed bid to assassinate the country’s ambassador. Last September, an ISKP suicide blast outside the Russian mission killed two of the embassy staffers. Taliban rulers usually downplay the Islamic State threat despite international reports about the growing activities of the group.
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