Suicide bomber kills 9 in Kabul; Taliban kill 16 in province
KABUL — An Islamic State suicide bomber targeted Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazaras on Friday, blowing himself up at a police checkpoint near a gathering of the minority Shiites in western Kabul, killing nine people and wounding 18, officials said.
In northern Afghanistan, the Taliban assaulted an army outpost overnight in an hours-long firefight, and ambushed policemen sent to help the troops, killing six soldiers and 10 members of the local police.
The attacks underscore the difficulties President Ashraf Ghani’s government is facing as it battles a revamped Taliban insurgency and struggles to rein in the Islamic State group, whose affiliate in Afghanistan has grown stronger since it emerged in 2014.
Kabul has recently seen a spate of large-scale militant attacks by the Taliban and also IS. In late January, a Taliban attacker drove an ambulance filled with explosives into the heart of the city, killing at least 103 people and wounding as many as 235.