On Friday, a suicide bomber attacked a learning centre in the Afghan capital as students prepared for university admission examinations, according to the police. The incident resulted in the deaths of 19 individuals.
The explosion took place in the neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi in western Kabul. Dasht-e-Barchi is a predominately Shiite Muslim neighbourhood that is also home to the minority Hazara group. This community has been the target of some of the worst assaults in Afghanistan.
Students at the Kaaj Higher Educational Center, the majority of whom are adult men and women, are given guidance and preparation for university admission examinations. Families hurried to local hospitals, where casualties were being brought in by ambulance and where names of those confirmed dead and injured were put on the walls.
At least one hospital was where the Taliban ordered relatives of victims to evacuate the premises in order to protect themselves from the possibility of a further assault on the crowd. Bloodied victims were seen being dragged away from the site in both videos that were uploaded online and images that were released by local media.
The security situation in Afghanistan has been becoming worse over the last few months, despite the fact that the restoration of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan last year brought an end to the two-decade conflict and a dramatic fall in violent crime.
Since the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, Shiite Hazaras have been persecuted, and the Taliban are blamed for the injustices committed against the minority during their first reign from 1996 to 2001.
Attacks directed towards Hazaras are also carried out often by the Islamic State armed organisation, which is an adversary of the Taliban. Both parties regard the other to be a heretic.
The Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood has been ravaged by a number of assaults, many of which specifically targeted women, children, and schools.
At least 85 individuals, the most of whom were female students, were murdered and around 300 others were injured when three bombs detonated near their school in the region a year ago, before the Taliban came to power in the country.
There was no organisation that took credit for the incident, although IS had claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on an educational centre in the same neighbourhood a year earlier that resulted in 24 deaths, including kids.
In May of 2020, the organisation was accused of carrying out a deadly gun assault on a maternity ward at a hospital in Dasht-e-Barchi, which resulted in the deaths of 25 people, including new mothers.
And in April of this year, there were two terrible bomb explosions at different educational centres in the neighbourhood, which resulted in the deaths of six individuals and injuries to at least twenty more.
Education is a very contentious matter in Afghanistan due to the fact that the Taliban prevent many females from continuing their education above the primary level, and the Islamic State is similarly opposed to the education of women and girls.