Thousands of protesters chanted slogans against the militant Islamic State group Wednesday as they carried the coffins of victims of an attack targeting a Shia mosque that killed 33 people in the western Afghan city of Herat.
Up to 5,000 angry mourners, including relatives of the dead, congregated near the site of Tuesday’s suicide bomb attack as IS claimed responsibility for the latest atrocity targeting the minority community.
“Death to Daesh (IS)!” and “Down with fundamentalism”, the demonstrators chanted, as the coffins were brought one by one and placed in a refrigerated lorry near the Jawadya mosque.
The mourners, who then marched to the cemetery to bury their dead, also demanded that the government bring the perpetrators to justice and pledged to “take revenge” if it did not.
Jilani Farhad, a spokesman for the governor of Herat province, said the death toll from the attack, in which two suicide bombers throwing grenades stormed the packed mosque, had risen to 33. Another 66 were wounded.
It came a day after IS claimed a deadly assault on the Iraqi embassy in Kabul as it extends its footprint in the war-torn country.
Underscoring the nation’s insecurity, a Taliban suicide bomber on Wednesday rammed a vehicle filled with explosives into a convoy of foreign forces in the restive southern province of Kandahar, killing two US soldiers.
Shias, a minority of around 3 million in Afghanistan, have regularly been targeted by IS militants over the last year.
They accuse police and troops of failing to protect them.
“I lost all my loved ones, they even killed children as young as seven. This wasn’t an attack on Shias, this was an attack on all Afghans, all Muslims,” Farhad Dost, whose cousin died in the assault, told AFP.
Members of the Shia community said police had fled their checkpost, around 100 metres from the mosque, after the two attackers struck at around 8:00 pm on Tuesday.
Source: Dawn
