“A bomb exploded near a girls’ school in a majority Shiite district of west Kabul on Saturday, killing at least 30 people, many of them young pupils between 11 and 15 years old,” NBC News reported on Saturday, May 8, 2021 (photo, left; read story here).
The Taliban denied responsibility and, “While no one has claimed responsibility … the Afghan Islamic State affiliate has targeted the Shiite neighborhood before,” NBC News said.
The U.K. tabloid Daily Mail (story here) said, “The Taliban condemned the attack … claiming it could only ‘Islamic State’. … The radical Sunni Muslim group has declared war on Afghanistan’s minority Shiite Muslims.”
Before the Soviet-Afghan War, Afghanistan was an agrarian country where rural life was dominated by religion, tribal customs, and clan leaders. While that war drove many Afghans into exile, and disrupted the traditional way of life, and then 20 years of U.S. military presence brought even more changes, Afghanistan remains more of a place than a nation, with the same societal divisions.
Its population is divided into tribes, with Pashtuns (42%) comprising the dominant group. This tribe’s homeland straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border, and its members live in both countries, freely crossing back and forth across the border. (This gave the Soviets major problems during that war, as mujahedin fighters could attack them in Afghanistan, then scurry back into Pakistan out of their reach.) Nearly all Taliban are Pashtun.
The country is 99.7% Muslim, dominated by Sunnis (over 90%), with Shiites (7%) occupying the status of a disfavored religious minority. The Islamic State in Afghanistan, like the Taliban, is a militant Sunni group; but the two factions, far from being allies, fight each other.
Either group could have a motive to attack the Kabul girls’ school. The ultra-conservative Taliban opposes education for girls, and they would not be allowed to learn reading and writing under a Taliban government. The Taliban also strictly enforces wearing of burqas and a requirement that women must be accompanied by a male relative in public. And both the Taliban and ISIS would be suspects in any attack on Shiites. The same Sunni-Shiite conflicts driving Middle East turmoil exist in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries.