Gunmen in Afghanistan killed 16 bus passengers and kidnapped 170 on Tuesday outside the northern city of Kunduz in an attack blamed on Taliban insurgents, a provincial official said.
Gunmen in Afghanistan killed 16 bus passengers and kidnapped 170 on Tuesday outside the northern city of Kunduz in an attack blamed on Taliban insurgents, a provincial official said.
The attackers stopped three buses on a road and ordered the passengers out, shot dead 16 of them and kidnapped the rest, said Massoum Hashemi, deputy police chief of Kunduz.
Government forces later freed most of the abducted passengers in a rescue operation.
“The Taliban have brutally killed 16 civilians and taken about 20 with them,” Hashemi said.
There was no claim of responsibility and Taliban spokesmen were not immediately available for comment. The Taliban have in the past denied accusations of attacks on civilians.
The identity of the victims was not immediately clear but a campaign of kidnappings against Shia Hazaras in the past year has became a source of ethnic tension, fueling concern about sectarian violence.
Since persecuting Hazaras and other minorities during their rule in the 1990s, the Taliban have largely avoided specifically targeting Shia Muslims.
But a rise in Afghanistan in the number of militants claiming allegiance to Islamic State, a hard-line Sunni movement that emphasises purging Shias and is a rival to the Taliban, has coincided with a number of attacks on Hazaras.
The brief capture by the Taliban of Kunduz last year was a major blow to the government of President Ashraf Ghani. The deterioration of security in the north has coincided with heavy fighting in the southern province of Helmand.
Residents of insurgency-prone Aliabad in Kunduz told AFP that the Taliban were holding an informal court in a local mosque, scrutinising the ID documents of the passengers and interrogating them for any government links.
Highways around Afghanistan passing through insurgency prone areas have become exceedingly dangerous, with the Taliban and other armed groups frequently kidnapping and killing travellers.
Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross hairs of Afghanistan’s worsening conflict.
