Eight killed as twin blasts hit buses in Kabul's Shia Hazara neighborhoods

Two separate bomb blasts have ripped through minibuses near a Shia Hazara neighborhood in the Afghan capital Kabul, killing at least eight people and injuring nine others, police sources say. 

Police spokesman Ferdaws Faramarz said on Thursday the first explosion happened on a road in southwestern Kabul near a neighborhood largely populated by the Shia Hazara community, which has been the frequent target of militant attacks.

Four people were killed in the blast, and four others wounded.

The rest of the casualties were caused hours later after a second bus was hit just a few kilometers away, also in a Hazara neighborhood, Faramarz said.

Earlier this week, the Daesh terrorist group claimed back-to-back attacks on two buses in Kabul that killed at least 10 people.

No group or individual has so far claimed responsibility for the latest attacks, which follow a dangerous pattern of similar attacks in recent months on the persecuted Hazara community in Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan.

On May 8, at least 68 people, mostly schoolgirls, lost their lives in explosions caused by a car bomb and mortar shells targeting a school in the Shia majority neighborhood of Dasht-e-Barchi in western Kabul.

The Hazara community on both sides of the border has suffered decades of persecution and attacks by violent militant groups operating across the troubled region.

Afghanistan has a grim history of ethnic violence. Thousands of Hazaras were systematically killed in northern Mazar-i-Sharif city in 1998, which some observers describe as “genocidal in its ferocity”.

The Taliban have distanced themselves from the violence perpetrated against the minority community, shifting the blame on Daesh.

Hazara Shia community and unending cycle of violence

Analyst says killing of Hazara Shias in Afghanistan and Pakistan has become so regular that they no longer evoke condemnation or outrage from the world

The Thursday attack was the latest in a series of violent attacks across Afghanistan, which have seen a sharp rise since the US missed a withdrawal deadline it had agreed with the Taliban in Doha last year.

The United States and its allies overthrew the Taliban regime shortly after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. But US forces have remained bogged down there through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden.

All foreign troops were supposed to have been withdrawn by May 1, as part of an agreement that the US had reached with the Taliban in the Qatari capital, Doha, last year. But Biden last month pushed that date back to September 11.

The Taliban warned that the passing of the May 1 deadline for a complete withdrawal “opened the way for” the militants to take every counteraction they deemed appropriate against foreign forces in the county.

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