A suicide attack against the Herat mosque also ends the lives of twenty faithful during the Friday prayer ceremony
Terror came to its appointment with Friday prayers in Afghanistan and at least twenty-one people lost their lives yesterday in a suicide attack registered in Herat, in the west of the country, and directed at an important religious linked to the Taliban. The attack took place at the Guzargah mosque, located on the outskirts of the city, just as the imam of the temple, Mujib Rahman Ansari, arrived. The suicide “blew himself up when he went to kiss his hands,” said Mahmoud Rasooli, a police spokesman in Herat. Leaders of the Islamist movement such as Zabihullah Mujahid condemned “the martyrdom of a brave and strong religious”.
Ansari was 38 years old and first thing in the morning he had met with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the Taliban and current deputy prime minister. The attackers waited for him to arrive at the mosque to attack just before the start of the prayer. A direct blow to the movement that has been ruling in Afghanistan for a year, which occurs less than a month after the assassination of Rahimullah Haqqani, the victim of another suicide attack in his madrasa (koranic school) in Kabul. Haqqani was known for his speeches against the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, which later claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Afghan website Khaama Press recalled the figure of an Ansari who made headlines in the press in June after proclaiming at a large gathering of religious from across the country organized by the Taliban that “whoever rebels against the Emirate must be beheaded.” In the Friday prayers, which he led from the previous government, he also preached against men whose wives do not cover themselves in public and called them “cowards”, advising them to stone adulterers or cut off the hands of thieves. Throughout the pandemic, he defended that it was “a divine punishment for the eradication of non-Muslims.”
This special envoy interviewed Mullah Ansari on several occasions in his humble home at the gates of the Herat mosque, the city where part of the Spanish contingent was deployed. He was a very young religious with more power in this province in the west of the country than the governor or the chiefs of police and army.
“You have no faith”
The last conversation was in October 2009, a few days after the death of the Spanish Corporal Cristo Ancor Cabello, 25, after an explosion as his armored car passed near Shinwashan, east of Herat. “The Taliban, as Muslims, think that when they give their lives they will go to heaven. Can you tell me where a foreign soldier goes when he dies? Your churches are empty, you have no faith, only the path of Islam will save you from a sure hell », were his words so as not to say directly that the destiny of « infidels » is hell.
With blue eyes, a bushy beard and a calm demeanor, he never allowed this journalist to take a picture of him and his excuse was always the same: “the day you are my brother and convert to Islam, then we will take pictures.” The Taliban lose one of the religious who did the most to keep his message alive among the faithful during the two decades of presence of international troops in the country.
The type of operation follows the pattern used by the IS, which in the last year has multiplied its Friday operations against the Taliban and against mosques of the Hazara minority, belonging to the Shiite sect of Islam. The Taliban insist that security is one of their greatest achievements since retaking power in Kabul, but the Islamic State is responding with the same tactics they used for two decades to sow instability.
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