Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
At least 42 children were wounded in an explosion near a school complex in Kabul, the United Nations said on Tuesday. The UN political mission in Afghanistan said the children were between nine and 14 years old.
The blast took place on Monday, and Afghan authorities and UN officials called for an investigation. Richard Bennett, the UN’s independent investigator for Afghanistan, condemned the “heinous attack harming numerous children near a school.”
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UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN mission in Afghanistan, known as UNAMA, had confirmed the injuries near the education centre. Earlier, Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran said “a number of children” had been wounded by a hand grenade on Monday and that an investigation was underway. He did not give further details.
Dujarric said UNAMA had called for an investigation to establish the circumstances of the explosion. Afghan media reported that around 50 children were hurt in the blast, which took place in a part of Kabul populated mainly by the Hazara ethnic minority. Hazaras make up about 9 per cent of Afghanistan’s population and have long faced attacks and persecution.
Most Hazaras are Shiite Muslims and have been repeatedly targeted in the past by Sunni Muslim radicals such as the Islamic State group. They have also faced discrimination in the Sunni-majority country. In May 2021, a few months before the Taliban seized power after the withdrawal of US-led troops, three bombings at a school in Kabul killed dozens of people from the Hazara community. Most of them were young girls leaving class.
That school, like the school complex where Monday’s explosion took place, was in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood, the main Hazara district in the Afghan capital. In a post on X, Bennett said an independent investigation to bring those responsible to justice was essential, adding: “Once again this mainly Hazara part of Kabul has been targeted. Deplorable!”
Dujarric also said the UN humanitarian office had noted that schooling in Afghanistan was already under strain, with girls denied access to education beyond the sixth grade. He said around two-thirds of the 900,000 children who returned to Afghanistan, mostly from neighbouring Pakistan, or about 600,000 youngsters, remain out of school. The UN and its humanitarian partners are supporting children’s education, but Dujarric said those efforts have been limited by continued underfunding.
The explosion near the Kabul school complex left dozens of children injured, prompted calls for an investigation and again drew attention to attacks in the mainly Hazara area of Dasht-e-Barchi, as well as the wider challenges facing children’s education in Afghanistan.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
