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Place of the suicide attack in Kabul against a gathering of Sunni scholars and religious cleric on November 21, 2018. (Omar Sobhani / Reuters)
KABUL – The toll of a devastating suicide bombing in Kabul was high on Wednesday, while Afghanistan was in shock from an attack against the country's highest religious body.
The assassination of a rally of Sunni clerics and clerics killed 55 people and wounded 94 others, the Afghan Ministry of Health said on Wednesday. More than 20 of the wounded were in critical condition.
Hundreds of delegates from the council of Afghan ulemas and their followers commemorated the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. A suicide bomber who had infiltrated the assembly blew up a vest filled with explosive explosives, destroying an opening narrative of Qur'anic verses, according to witnesses and officials.
[[[[Sunni explosion in Kabul blew up]
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicions quickly fell on the Islamic State. The militant group's tactics in Afghanistan proved too radical, even for the Taliban insurgency movement, which issued a statement in which it declared that it "strongly condemned" Tuesday's bloodshed.
The survivors on Wednesday described scenes of carnage that occurred when an explosion and a fireball exploded in a large room usually used for weddings at a hotel in Kabul, just as a prayer leader was reciting a version of the story. Quran to open the program.
Injured men are treated at a hospital after a suicide bombing in Kabul on November 20, 2018. (Rahmat Gul / AP)
Shafiullah Jarah, a 19-year-old student at an Islamic religious school, was among the victims. He attended the ceremony with dozens of friends from the Madrassa Mufti Numan in northern Kabul. When he looked around after the explosion, he was surrounded by body pieces, some of which belonged to classmates, he recalled Wednesday.
Nine of his friends were killed and a dozen were wounded, said Jarah.
"We slipped on the blood," he added. "The face of every corpse I turned back was that of a friend."
President Ashraf Ghani called the attack "unforgivable" and said Wednesday a day of national mourning.
The US ambassador to Afghanistan, John R. Bass, said on Twitter that he was "disgusted and deeply saddened" by the terrorist attack.
A wounded Afghan man holds an IV bottle at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital on November 21, 2018, a day after a suicide bombing of a religious celebration in Kabul. (Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty Images)
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan called this "atrocity" and demanded that the perpetrators be "brought to justice".
[[[[ISIS kamikaze attends meeting of Afghan clergy who have just condemned terrorism]
"Nobody can justify such an attack," said 22-year-old Fazul Rahman, while he was waiting in front of the Kabul emergency hospital on Wednesday for news of his uncle, wounded in the town. ;bombing.
Rahman rushed to the hospital shortly after receiving a call regarding his uncle's injury Tuesday night.
"It was a horror," he said about the scene outside the hospital as people desperately searched for loved ones.
Thirty-seven victims were taken to the emergency hospital, according to a list posted on a chart outside the institution. Five were dead, the others wounded.
Jarah, the madrassa student, may have survived the attack physically. But, like other survivors, he said he was traumatized by what he had experienced – mental injuries that seemed unlikely to heal any time soon.
"God destroys the people behind the blast," he said. "I swear I will never forget it."
Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
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