IS claims responsibility for Afghanistan attack that killed Taliban official

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility Thursday for a suicide attack that killed the Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Balkh province.

An IS fighter waited for the governor outside his office and “rushed towards him, detonating his explosive belt,” the group said in a statement on its Amaq news agency.

The Taliban governor, known for fighting against Islamic State jihadists, was killed in a suicide attack at his office on Thursday, officials said.

The killing, a day after he met top government officials visiting from Kabul, makes Mohammad Dawood Muzammil one of the highest-ranking figures slain since the Taliban stormed back to power in 2021.

“Two people, including Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the governor of Balkh, have been killed in an explosion this morning,” local police spokesman Asif Waziri told AFP, adding that the blast happened on the second floor of his office, in the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif.

The Taliban and IS share an austere Sunni Islamist ideology, but the latter are fighting to establish a global “caliphate” instead of the Taliban’s more inward-looking goal of ruling an independent Afghanistan.

With inputs from AFP.

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