(JustPatriots.com)- The death toll of a suicide bombing has risen to 53 after 46 girls and young women were reportedly killed in an Afghan education center, according to the UN. 110 additional women have been wounded in the attack.
A suicide bomber reportedly blew himself up in a gender-segregated study hall filled with hundreds of students as they sat for a practice test to be admitted into university. The bombing occurred in a Shiite Muslim Hazara community in Kabul, which has recently experienced extreme violence.
“Our human rights team continues documenting the crime: verifying facts & establishing reliable data to counter denial & revisionism,” the United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) tweeted.
Afghanistan’s Taliban, who now control the country, have acknowledged the attack and have placed the death toll at 25, with 33 others wounded. No group has yet taken responsibility for the attack and no group has yet been named by authorities, but jihadist Islamic State group (IS), which considers Shiites heretics, remains a suspect after numerous attacks in the past targeting girls, schools, and mosques.
The group claimed responsibility for an attack on an educational center in the same area that killed 24.
Both the Taliban and IS are against education for girls in the country and actively are blocking females from returning to secondary education. The recent suicide bombing in the Shiite Muslim Hazara community has sparked protests by women in Kabul and other cities in the majority Sunni country.
Before the U.S. ceded power to the Taliban last year, at least 85 people, mostly girls, were reportedly killed with 300 wounded, when three bombs exploded near a school in Dasht-e-Barchi.
The Taliban recently mobilized 16 high ranking members of foreign terrorist groups to Kabul and then transferred them to the Baghlan, Kunduz and Badakhshan provinces in northern Afghanistan, where they stayed three days in the home of a senior Haqqani network official in Wazir Akbar Khan. The Haqqani network is an Afghan Sunni Islamist guerrilla insurgent group, founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a known associate of Usama Bin Laden was, according to a report.
