The offices of Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, were the target of a bomb attack on Friday, with no information so far on possible casualties or claims of responsibility for the attack.
Local sources quoted by Afghan television news channel 1TV said that several attackers set off explosives at the facility, located on Dar al-Amman road, after which a confrontation with Hekmatyar’s bodyguards ensued.
According to information gathered by the Afghan news agency Pajhwok, the explosion would have affected a mosque located in the offices of Hezb-e-Islami, although the authorities have not made any statement and the party has not issued any statement to explain the situation.
Hekmatyar, one of the most prominent ‘mujahideen’ figures during the war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, was one of the warlords involved in a bloody civil war following the departure of Soviet troops from the country, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them civilians.
During that conflict, Hekmatyar’s militiamen were responsible for much of the destruction of Kabul due to their continuous bombing of the capital, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties, after which he served as prime minister in two stints before the Taliban took control of the country, causing him to flee to Iran, from where he was expelled in 2002.
Subsequently, he issued a statement to call for ‘jihad’ against the United States for its presence in Afghanistan, after which he was declared in 2003 as a «global terrorist» by Washington, although in 2016 he reached a peace agreement with the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, which allowed his return to the country, from where he called on the Taliban to surrender their weapons and join the peace.
