Afghanistan: Blast at mosque in Kandahar city; at least 15 dead

A large explosion tore through a Shi’ite synagogue in the southern Afghan megacity of Kandahar during Friday prayers, killing at least 15 people and wounding 31, with the casualty risk likely to rise, officers said.

Taliban interior ministry spokesperson Qari Saeed Khosti said authorities were collecting details of the explosion, which took place days after a self-murder lemon attack claimed by Islamic State (ISIS) on a Shi’ite synagogue in the northern megacity of Kunduz that killed scores of people.
Photos and mobile phone footage posted by intelligencers on social media showed numerous people supposedly dead or seriously wounded on the bloody bottom of the Imam Bargah synagogue.

A health functionary said 15 dead and 31 wounded had been brought to the megacity’s Mirwais sanitarium but the aggregate was anticipated to rise, with ambulances still bringing victims in.
Taliban special forces arrived to secure the point and an appeal went out to residers to contribute blood for the wounded.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
The blast, coming so soon after the Kunduz attack underscored the decreasingly uncertain security in Afghanistan as the Taliban grapple with an raising profitable and philanthropic extremity that threatens millions with hunger.

The original chapter of ISIS, known as Islamic State Khorasan, after an ancient name for the region covering Afghanistan, has stepped up attacks following the Taliban palm over the Western- backed government in Kabul in August.
Taliban officers have played down the trouble from Islamic State but the repeated attacks have spoiled its claim to have brought peace to Afghanistan after four decades of war.

The fact that the Shi’ite nonage has again been targeted may also inflame pressures among different ethnical and insular groups in the largely Sunni country.