Karzai Calls on Pakistan for Answers on Suicide Attacks

KABUL—Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he would ask Pakistan to explain why it provides sanctuary for an extremist group suspected of killing dozens in two suicide bombings in Afghanistan that are likely to exacerbate strains between the two neighbors.

 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited the wounded from Tuesday's suicide bomb attack on an Ashura mourning procession, at a hospital in Kabul on Wednesday.

Mr. Karzai, who visited survivors at a Kabul hospital, pledged to seek justice with a thorough investigation into Tuesday's attacks, which targeted Shiite gatherings in Kabul and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
"Afghanistan takes this very seriously. It is the issue of the life of the people which we will fully follow up with Pakistan," he said. "We can't let go and ignore the blood of our children."
A Pakistan-based militant group notorious for attacks on Shiites, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, took responsibility for the attacks. Afghan officials said Wednesday that 56 people were killed in the Kabul blast, a downward revision from tuesday when they said 59 died in the attack. Four others were killed in Mazar-e-Sharif.
The U.S. Embassy said one American was killed in the Kabul attack, and it was investigating reports that a second U.S. citizen may have been among the dead.
Citing the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claim, Mr. Karzai said he would ask Pakistan to explain why it allows such groups to operate within its borders. Tuesday's explosions, some of the worst since the war began ten years ago, followed a dramatic deterioration in Pakistan's ties with Kabul.
In September, Afghan officials accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate spy agency of involvement in the assassination, by a purported Taliban emissary who arrived from Pakistan, of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the country's main peace negotiator. Pakistan denied those accusations.
Last month, ties were further strained as a joint U.S.-Afghan patrol called an airstrike that mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops posted along the border.

 

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai greets a girl who was wounded in the attack on an Ashura mourning procession.

Islamabad responded to the airstrike by shutting the border to coalition supplies bound for Afghanistan, and ousting the U.S. from an airbase on its soil.
Other Afghan officials have gone further than Mr. Karzai, openly accusing the ISI of orchestrating Tuesday's bombings. "ISI is directly involved in the attack," a senior Afghan security official said. "The main purpose is to spark sectarian violence among Afghans. The militants have used every single tactic in the war, but have failed—and now this was their new tactic and they successfully carried it out."
An ISI spokesman in Pakistan denied this and challenged Afghan officials to prove their claims. "Can you ask them to show the proof?" he said.
Some Pakistani analysts also scorned the Afghan assertions. "It's a piece of sheer ignorance on the part of Afghan intelligence if they think Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is backed by the ISI," said Imtiaz Gul, director of the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies, a think tank.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has turned on the Pakistan state since being banned a decade ago, and was involved in attempts to kill former President Pervez Musharraf and other political leaders. Their campaign against Shiites in Baluchistan province also has caused significant security problems for the government there.

Photographer Joel van Houdt was taking pictures of Ashura celebrations in Kabul when a bomb went off nearby. This is his description of events.

Joel van Houdt for The Wall Street Journal

A man carried a child minutes after a blast in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday.

Photos

Omar Sobhani/Reuters

Afghans prayed over the grave of a victim of Tuesday's attack during a funeral ceremony in Kabul Wednesday.

Critics say Pakistan has been reluctant to crack down on the organization for fear of a backlash.
The Afghan security official, along with a senior official with the U.S.-led military coalition, said there were indications that the Haqqani network, the Afghan militant group responsible for most of the recent high-profile attacks in Kabul, had helped facilitate Tuesday's blasts.
The Haqqanis are part of the Taliban movement and recognize the authority of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, though the group operates on its own. The Taliban condemned Tuesday's bombings as "inhuman and un-Islamic," denying any involvement.

On Wednesday, another deadly blast killed 19 Afghan civilians when a packed van hit a hidden explosive in Helmand Province's Sangin District, a volatile area of southern Afghanistan that remains a focus of the military effort to drive Taliban insurgents out of their longtime strongholds.
In Kabul, as Afghan Shiites buried their dead, one Shiite cleric urged mourners not to let the attacks create a dangerous rift between Afghan's majority Sunni and minority Shiite populations that could drag the country back into a brutal civil war.
"Our people must think sensibly and realize that the real enemies of Afghanistan and Afghans want to destroy the unity between Shiite and Sunnis in Afghanistan," said Mohammad Baqer Nateqi, a cleric speaking to 700 people gathered for the burial of five victims of the Kabul blast. Shiites account for some 20% of Afghanistan's Sunni-majority population.
The mourners directed their fury at Pakistan. "It is Pakistan that kills our people," said Rafiq, who lost a 25-year-old cousin in the Kabul blast. "Soon, tolerance will be finished."
At a Kabul hospital, Karima, a 22-year-old mother of four, recovered from the explosion, which took the lives of ten of her relatives. Still disoriented from the blast, which ravaged the right side of her body, Karima hadn't been told that three of her four children were among the dead.
"I don't know who is dead and who is alive," she said from her hospital bed.
Karima had taken the children—ages two, three and four—to the Shiite shrine in Kabul's old city for Ashura, a day of mourning that commemorates the killing of Prophet Muhammad's grandson Imam Hussein during Islam's seventh-century split into Sunni and Shiite sects.
As the family watched the processions of men whipping their own bare backs with sharp blades set on steel chains, the suicide bomber detonated his explosives.
Her husband, Zabih, buried their three children and seven other relatives Wednesday morning, and turned his attention toward looking after their only surviving child. "I am sitting in my house, alone, with my daughter, as a single man," he said.
 
—Ziaulhaq Sultani in Kabul and Tom Wright in New Delhi contributed to this article.