Bomb, mortars kill 23 civilians in Afghanistan

KABUL: A car bombing and mortar shells fired at a busy market in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province on Monday killed 23 people, including children, a statement from a provincial governor’s office said.

Afghan government officials and Taliban blamed each other for the attack on the open-air weekly cattle market in Sangin district where hundreds of villagers from neighboring districts had gathered to trade sheep and goats.

A spokesman for Helmand’s governor said the several rockets fired by Taliban insurgents landed close to the cattle market, killing 23 civilians, including women children.

Taliban officials blamed the government officials for killing the civilians. A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Yusouf Ahmadi denied the insurgents were involved in the bombing.

The Taliban claimed the military fired mortars into the market while the military said a car bomb and mortar shells fired by the insurgents targeted the civilians.

The army also said there was no military activity in the area on Monday and that two Taliban fighters were also killed when the car bomb detonated at the marketplace. Livestock that the locals were selling on the market, sheep and goats, were also killed.

A statement from the presidential palace said Afghan President Ashraf Ghani strongly condemned the brutal and inhumane act,” and stressed that targeting civilians, especially children and adults, is against Islamic and human values.

“The government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan once again calls on the Taliban to refrain from war and violence and to accept the will of the Afghan people, which is the end of the war and the start of negotiations,” Ghani’s statement said.

Earlier, two members of Afghanistan’s independent human rights commission were killed in a bomb blast in Kabul on June 27.

In a statement, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said that a 24-year-old donor coordinator Fatima Khalil and a 41-year-old driver Ahmad Jawed Fold were killed in an explosive device bomb attack.

The AIHRC said, “It is intolerable, assassinating human rights defenders is a war crime in the context of armed conflict.” adding that staff had previously been the target of attacks. The United Nations and foreign powers, including the United Kingdom and Turkey, condemned Saturday’s attack.