More than 60 Dead, 170 Injured in Twin Attacks

KABUL - Twin blasts in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif targeted Shiite community Tuesday, killing more than 60 people in one of the deadliest attacks and infusing the 10-year-old conflict with a new danger of sectarian strife.
The Taliban, Afghanistan's main insurgent group, quickly denied responsibility for the bombings, calling the attacks "inhumane and un-Islamic" and urging its fighters not to cause civilian casualties.
Afghan officials said that at least 55 people -- many of them children and women -- were killed and more than 160 others wounded in Kabul when a suicide bomber hit the packed streets near the Abul Fazal shrine on the riverbank in the capital's old city. A separate bomb killed at least four people near a Shiite mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, according to local officials.

In both cities, the worshippers were gathered for the Shiite festival of Ashura, which commemorates the killing of Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussain during the wars that marked the seventh-century split between Islam's Sunni and Shiite sects.

"It is the first time that, on such an important religious day in Afghanistan, terrorism of that horrible nature is taking place," Afghan president Hamid Karzai said Tuesday in Germany, where he attended an international conference on the future of Afghanistan.

Karzai and other Afghan leaders appealed for calm as angry Shiite protesters engaged in sporadic clashes with security forces in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif after the bombings.

The blast in Kabul happened during the self-flagellation ceremony, as men whipped their own backs with sharp knives and razors outside the mosque. Bodies were scattered across the road. Anguished women in burqas pushed past Afghan soldiers on the scene, trying to find their loved ones.

One young man at the scene blamed the Afghan government for failing to protect the gathering. "Oh Muslims!" he shouted as police cordoned off the scene. "This government is useless and good for nothing. It can't provide security."

Afghan Shiites, mostly of the Hazara ethnicity, account for some 20 percent of Afghanistan's population and traditionally occupied the lowest rungs of society.

In a statement Tuesday, the Afghan Taliban high command, which calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said that it will "never let anybody take action against our compatriots based on their religious sect, ethnicity or regional origin" and blamed the twin bombings on the US-led coalition.

The American embassy in Kabul condemned the attacks, saying the US "remains undeterred in standing with the Afghan people against the scourge of terrorism." (Monitoring Desk)