Separate explosions, set off by sticky bombs attached to cars, killed at least two people in the Afghan capital on Tuesday, including a prominent cleric who headed an Islamist nonprofit organization, officials said.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani denounced the cleric's death as a “”terrorist attack on the dignity and bright future of Afghanistan."
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the Kabul attacks, which also wounded five people, The Associated Press reported.
The first bomb was attached to a military vehicle in central Kabul and wounded two military personnel, said Ferdaws Faramarz, spokesman for the Kabul police chief.
An hour later, the second bomb, in the northern part of the city, killed two people, including cleric Mohammad Atef, and wounded two others. A third sticky bomb wounded one person in western Kabul. Faramarz said police are investigating.
Ghani, in a statement released by the Presidential Palace, also said that Atef's killing was the latest in a series of targeted crimes and assassinations.
Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of the country's High Council for National Reconciliation, also condemned Atef's killing.
“Atef was a supporter of peace and reconciliation in the country," he said in a statement. “But unfortunately, the enemies of the Afghan people took him away from us.”
In recent months, ISIS has claimed responsibility for multiple attacks in Kabul, including on schools and educational institutions that killed 50 people, most of them students. ISIS has also claimed responsibility for rocket attacks in December that targeted the key US base in Afghanistan. There were no casualties in those attacks.
On Monday, a report by a US government watchdog — the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR — said that Taliban attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul are also on the rise, with increasing targeted killings of government officials, civil-society leaders and journalists.
SIGAR, which monitors the billions of dollars the U. spends in war-ravaged country, said that the proportion of casualties caused by improvised explosive devices increased by nearly 17% in the last quarter of 2020, correlating with an increase in attacks by magnetically attached bombs, or “sticky bombs."
Afghanistan has also seen a wave of attacks in recent months of attacks against journalists, human rights activists and civil society members in so-called targeted killings.
