A bombing claimed by the Islamic State wing in Afghanistan killed at least seven people and wounded more than a dozen in a Chinese restaurant in Kabul on Monday, officials said, in a sign of the group’s persistent threat despite the Afghan government’s claim to have vanquished it.
The blast ripped through a noodle restaurant on a busy street of central Kabul filled with shops selling flowers, antiquities and rugs on Monday afternoon. A single attacker detonated his explosive vest 30 minutes after entering the restaurant, according to a statement released by the Islamic State through its media wing.
A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Abdul Mateen Qani, told The New York Times that seven people had been killed, including a Chinese citizen. He also said that the attack had been carried out by a single attacker from the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, the group’s Afghanistan affiliate.
ISIS-K says it has targeted Chinese citizens in retaliation for Beijing’s oppression of Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China, and has criticized the Afghan government’s dealings with Beijing.
Emergency, an Italian nonprofit medical group operating in Kabul, said it had received 20 people at its surgical center, including seven who were dead on arrival. A child was among the dead, Emergency’s country director, Dejan Panic, said in a statement.
Unlike most Western countries, China has maintained sustained diplomatic ties with the Taliban administration in Afghanistan. In 2023, China became the first country to appoint an ambassador in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021, and has signed mining contracts to tap into vast Afghan oil and mineral reserves. China has also vowed to include Afghanistan in the Belt and Road Initiative, its trillion-dollar global infrastructure project. Its foreign minister, Wang Yi, even visited Kabul last summer.
But China has grown increasingly wary about potential insecurity in Afghanistan, even though the government has control of large swaths of the country and has tried to woo foreign investors back.
China urged the Taliban government earlier this month to engage in “more visible and verifiable actions to dismantle and eliminate all terrorist organizations based in Afghanistan.” At least five Chinese citizens were killed last month in two attacks in Tajikistan near the border with Afghanistan. Tajikistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs blamed “criminal groups” operating from Afghanistan, and China has since urged its citizens to avoid the border area.
“China strongly condemns and firmly opposes all forms of terrorism and supports Afghanistan and regional countries in jointly combating all forms of terrorist violence,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a news briefing on Tuesday.
Security forces heavily guarded the area around the restaurant on Tuesday, as residents were still cleaning broken glass littering the street. Businesses had reopened, with employees in flower shops making bouquets and blood stains still visible on the windows of nearby boutiques.
Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The post Islamic State Claims Deadly Attack on Chinese Restaurant in Afghanistan appeared first on New York Times.
