Maybe we can taunt the Taliban a second time

More tragedy in Kabul, from the UN…

The United Nations has condemned the deadly bomb blasts at two educational institutions in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, on Wednesday, which killed at least six people and wounded nearly 20 others.

The explosions took place at the all-boys Abdul Rahim Shahid high school and the nearby Mumtaz Education Centre, both located in the Dasht-e-Barchi area, a predominantly Shiite Muslim neighbourhood in western Kabul.

The attack at the Abdul Rahim Shahid high school reportedly occurred as students were coming out of their morning classes, according to the UN in Afghanistan. The blasts at the Mumtaz Education Centre followed shortly afterwards.

This Dasht-e-Barchi area is on the west side of Kabul and is a Shiite neighborhood largely populated by Hazaras. A sizeable minority spread across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Hazaras speak a dialect of Farsi and have been persecuted in the past by the Taliban.

Here’s some brief footage from Twitter from the area of the school, which is here in Google Maps.

This neighborhood has been targeted before. This was from last year:

A blast outside a school in the Afghan capital on Saturday killed at least 25 people and wounded another 52 including students, the interior ministry said.
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In May last year a group of gunmen attacked a hospital in the area in a brazen daylight raid that left 25 people killed, including 16 mothers of new-born babies.
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On October 24, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a tuition centre in the same district, killing 18 people including students in an attack that also went unclaimed.

As the US was in the process of fleeing the country last year, the Hazaras expressed their growing fear that the Taliban would again step up attacks on them…

Twenty years after they blew up the giant Buddha statues that had looked over the Bamiyan Valley for centuries, the Taliban insist they have become more moderate since they last ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s. But for many Afghans, particularly minority groups – such as women and the Hazaras – who endured the worst of the Taliban’s hardline policies in the past, it’s a dangerously low bar.

The Taliban’s reassurances that they will not revert to the bad old ways of the 1990s have failed to assuage the fears of Afghanistan’s Hazara community, according to Ibrahimi.

“The Hazaras are very fearful that the Taliban will likely be reinstating the policies of the 1990s. The Hazaras were important participants in the democratic political process, in civil society and human rights groups,” explained Ibrahimi. “They placed so much faith and trust in the political process, they saw it as a way out of poverty. Now they see everything falling apart.”

An Amnesty International report released Friday of a Taliban massacre of nine Hazara men in the eastern Ghazni province from July 4 to July 6 has further undermined the Taliban’s claims that they have changed.

“Reassurances” from the Taliban are worth, approximately, a teaspoon of spit. The US State Dept issued the usual pablum which closed with this:

All Afghan children deserve to pursue their studies safely and without fear of violence.

Feckless words from a waning superpower half a world away are a poor deterrent against killers who would happily blow up “Afghan children.” Such words make the US look weaker in Kabul. But then again, the US has already accomplished that.