The violence isn’t even close to over in Afghanistan. 84 people were killed in Nice by Islamist terrorism, now another 61 Afghanis, members of the Hazara minority, were killed by bombs in Kabul, and another 207 were injured. ISIS claims responsibility. As CNN reports:
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack through its Aamaq news agency. The purported claim was reported by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant websites. It says two of the group’s fighters detonated explosive belts and were targeting a “gathering of Shiites.”
The thousands-strong march through Kabul on Saturday was demanding that “a major regional electric power line be routed through their impoverished home province,” as the AP reports. Government officials had rebuffed their calls, saying that rerouting the line “would cost millions and delay the badly needed project by years.”
. . . Hazaras make up most of Afghanistan’s Shiite minority – and the Islamic State group considers Shiite Muslims apostates.
The Taliban has killed thousands of Hazaras, as NPR has reported. It condemned this attack and denied involvement, according to the BBC.
There’s a video on the CNN site that shows the aftermath of the bombing, but since it shows the dead and wounded, you can go to the site yourself to see it. Multiple 268 by the average number of people in each person’s network of friends and loved ones. That’s the toll of grief. Or multiply what you felt when you lost a loved one, and multiply it by 61. That’s the titer of misery—beyond, of course, that of the lives that were lost, who will never feel anything again.
As the BBC reported, a freelancer working for its Afghan service said “blood and body parts were everywhere, with debris strewn around.”
The Times spoke with Muhammed Ali, a protester “whose clothes were covered in blood.” He said “he had personally loaded dozens of dead bodies into trucks.”
“People were going toward a prayer break when two explosions happened – one near the truck where speeches were given,” Ali told the Times.
It is the height of insanity for anybody to kill in the name of religion, but it’s even more ridiculous when you see that these two groups are both Muslims, but kill each other because they differ in who they see as the rightful heirs of Mohammed. And I can’t imagine that if we had a world without religion, those people would be dead. I’m not, of course, saying that in a religion-free world we’d see no murders. People kill for all sorts of reasons, and all manner of ideologies. But is it too much to claim that removing the ideologies would lessen the deaths?
UPDATE: Reader Barry contributed this:
