ISIS-K bombs Kabul military hospital
WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – An ISIS-K terrorist attack occurred on Tuesday, as Afghanistan’s largest military hospital was hit by a complex military operation consisting of a suicide bomber, who was followed by gunmen, after opening a path for them.
Hours later, ISIS-K claimed credit for the attack, which was the fourth major ISIS-K assault since Aug. 15, when the Taliban took control of the country, with unanticipated speed, leading to sharp criticism of the Biden administration.
Tuesday’s mid-day attack on the 400-bed Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan hospital in Kabul killed at least 25 people, including a senior Taliban commander.
A suicide bomber riding a motorcycle was deployed to assault the entrance to the hospital. The motorcycle bomb breached the defensive barrier which surrounds the facility. Once that line was opened, gunmen poured through it to attack inside the hospital itself, going room to room, firing on the hapless occupants.
Among those killed was Mawlawi Hamdullah Mukhlis, head of the Kabul military corps and one of the first Taliban commanders to enter Afghanistan’s presidential palace, after the Taliban captured the country’s capital.
Taliban Misrepresent Scale of Attack
An official Taliban spokesman grossly understated the losses in speaking to the media. Zabihullah Mujahid told The Washington Post that seven civilians were killed, contradicting a hospital doctor who told the Post that he “saw at least 20 dead and more than 37 wounded inside the building.”
Although the doctor and other eyewitnesses described casualties inside the hospital, Mujahid told Reuters that Taliban special forces were dropped by helicopter outside the hospital and had even succeeded in preventing the attackers from entering the building.
Yet as the Post reported, “A local Taliban commander said clashes inside the hospital lasted nearly an hour and a half before the attackers were stopped.”
Background to Attack
ISIS-K was established in early 2015, at the height of ISIS’ conquests in its homeland in Iraq and Syria. As long as US forces and those of its NATO allies were in Afghanistan, they assisted Afghan forces in beating back ISIS-K. But the departure of those forces has left the Taliban to combat ISIS-K with only the help that it can get from its backers in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI.)
ISIS-K does not really control territory in Afghanistan. Yet it does have something of a base of operations. It is most active in the east, in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces. The Taliban are based in the south, in Kandahar.
Already on Aug. 26, while the US and NATO forces were still in Afghanistan facilitating evacuations, an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 US soldiers and nearly 200 Afghans at an entrance to Kabul airport.
A month later, ISIS-K carried out a spate of attacks in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province, on September 18 and 19 and again on September 22 and 23. It claimed that it was targeting the “apostate” Taliban militia.
Casualties were relatively light in those attacks. They were much larger the following month, when ISIS-K attacked two Shi’ite mosques.
One such assault occurred on Oct. 8 in the northern city of Kunduz. Some 50 people were killed. On the following Friday in Kandahar, another attack killed a similar number of Shiite worshipers.
In choosing those areas to attack, ISIS-K may have meant to signal that its deadly reach extended broadly throughout the country.
In any event, it seems the Taliban are having significant difficulties in countering ISIS-K, and it is not hard to see how the Taliban’s weakness could gain it international support, and eventual recognition, as it fights a terrorist group that is even more violent and vicious than it is.