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US blames brutal attack on Afghan maternity hospital on IS
By KATHY GANNON and TAMEEM AKHGAR May 15, 2020
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A U.S. official said Friday he is convinced the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan carried out this week’s horrific attack on a maternity hospital in a majority Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Kabul, killing 24 people, including newborn babies and mothers.
Peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said the U.S. government believes IS was behind Tuesday’s attack on the hospital and an assault earlier the same day in the country’s east that targeted the funeral of a pro-government warlord, killing 34 people.
The Islamic State group “has demonstrated a pattern for favoring these types of heinous attacks against civilians and is a threat to the Afghan people and to the world,” Khalilzad tweeted. He did not elaborate further.
IS has not claimed responsibility for the Kabul attack, which Doctors without Borders — a Paris-based charity that operates the hospital — called “pure hell.” The organization, which also goes under its French acronym MSF, said gunmen headed straight to the maternity wards, ignoring units closer to the entrance of the medical complex, searching out the newborns and the mothers.
“They went through the rooms ... shooting women in their beds. It was methodical. Walls sprayed with bullets, blood on the floors in the rooms, vehicles burnt out and windows shot through,” said Frederic Bonnot, head of MSF programs in Afghanistan. “They came to kill the mothers.”
One of the attackers was just 16 years old, said Abdul Habib Faizi, the head of the hospitals’ nursing department. He said it seemed the killers knew the layout of the hospital, moving floor to floor, throwing up to eight grenades as they went, storming the room where women were breast-feeding their babies and gunning them down.
The IS affiliate in Afghanistan is based in eastern Nangarhar province and mostly targets the country’s minority Shiites. In 2018, IS killed dozens of young students taking university entrance exams in the same Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood of Kabul.
The militants have also issued past warnings to Shiites, threatening to kill them in mosques, schools and homes.
The IS claimed responsibility for the attack on the funeral in Nangarhar while the Taliban denied involvement in either attack, calling the carnage at the maternity hospital a “vile, inhumane and an un-Islamic act.”...
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It was genocide.
US blames brutal attack on Afghan maternity hospital on IS
By KATHY GANNON and TAMEEM AKHGAR May 15, 2020
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A U.S. official said Friday he is convinced the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan carried out this week’s horrific attack on a maternity hospital in a majority Shiite Muslim neighborhood in Kabul, killing 24 people, including newborn babies and mothers.
Peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said the U.S. government believes IS was behind Tuesday’s attack on the hospital and an assault earlier the same day in the country’s east that targeted the funeral of a pro-government warlord, killing 34 people.
The Islamic State group “has demonstrated a pattern for favoring these types of heinous attacks against civilians and is a threat to the Afghan people and to the world,” Khalilzad tweeted. He did not elaborate further.
IS has not claimed responsibility for the Kabul attack, which Doctors without Borders — a Paris-based charity that operates the hospital — called “pure hell.” The organization, which also goes under its French acronym MSF, said gunmen headed straight to the maternity wards, ignoring units closer to the entrance of the medical complex, searching out the newborns and the mothers.
“They went through the rooms ... shooting women in their beds. It was methodical. Walls sprayed with bullets, blood on the floors in the rooms, vehicles burnt out and windows shot through,” said Frederic Bonnot, head of MSF programs in Afghanistan. “They came to kill the mothers.”
One of the attackers was just 16 years old, said Abdul Habib Faizi, the head of the hospitals’ nursing department. He said it seemed the killers knew the layout of the hospital, moving floor to floor, throwing up to eight grenades as they went, storming the room where women were breast-feeding their babies and gunning them down.
The IS affiliate in Afghanistan is based in eastern Nangarhar province and mostly targets the country’s minority Shiites. In 2018, IS killed dozens of young students taking university entrance exams in the same Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood of Kabul.
The militants have also issued past warnings to Shiites, threatening to kill them in mosques, schools and homes.
The IS claimed responsibility for the attack on the funeral in Nangarhar while the Taliban denied involvement in either attack, calling the carnage at the maternity hospital a “vile, inhumane and an un-Islamic act.”...
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It was genocide.
