Kabul: At least 28 people, including women and children, were killed in an attack on a Shiite mosque in the Afghan capital during prayers.
Mohammad Salim Rasouli, chief of Kabul’s hospitals, said Saturday that more than 50 others were wounded in the attack a day earlier.
There were four attackers. Two blew themselves up and another two were shot to death by Afghan security forces.
Islamic State group claimed the responsibility for the attack. The Islamic State said in a statement on the website of its Aamaq news agency that it had deployed two attackers to the mosque.
President Ashraf Ghani condemned the violence and said the terrorists were turning to attacking places of worship because they were losing on the battlefield. He urged Islamic clerics everywhere to condemn the bloodshed.
The gun fire and explosions went on for four hours during the afternoon before the four attackers were killed.
The cleric who was performing the prayers was among the dead, said Mir Hussain Nasiri, a member of Afghanistan’s Shiite clerical council. The gunmen had taken over both the cavernous prayer hall for the men and the separate, second-floor prayer area for the women, he said.
The mosque could accommodate up to 1,000 people, Nasiri added.
When police initially tried to get inside, they discovered the terrorists had blocked the door leading to the second floor, turning the women upstairs into hostages, Nasiri said.
Family members and relatives of the victims gathered Saturday to bury the bodies inside the mosque compound.
Last month, the Sunni-dominated Islamic State group attacked the Iraqi Embassy in Kabul and then warned Shiites in Afghanistan that their mosques would be targeted. Sunni extremists consider Shiites to be heretics.
Within days of that, IS also took responsibility for a suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in western Herat province that left 32 people dead.
