Taliban ambulance attack kills 95 in Kabul


At least 95 people were killed and another 158 injured Saturday by a Taliban suicide bomber who detonated an ambulance full of explosives in Kabul, Afghanistan. The attacker made it past two security checkpoints to explode the vehicle near the capital city's former interior ministry building in a bustling neighborhood hosting foreign embassies and the police headquarters.
Afghanistan's chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, condemned the "insane, inhuman, heinous" attack on Twitter, labeling it a war crime and vowing both justice and "necessary measures to avoid such barbarism" going forward. "Our priority and focus right now is to help those in need and provide the best treatment for those wounded," he wrote in a second post. "This is the moment when we all need to stand together and punch our enemy hard. This is enough!"
"We condemn today's cowardly bombing in Kabul and those who perpetrated it," said a statement from the U.S. State Department. "Our thoughts are with the victims and their families, and we stand with the brave people of #Afghanistan."
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This comes one week after a Taliban-claimed hotel siege in Kabul left 22 dead. The Taliban has reclaimed significant territory in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in 2001.
This is a breaking news story and has been updated throughout.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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