Taliban militants attacked an election office in the Afghan capital Tuesday next to the home of one of the country’s leading presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani.
Ghani was not in the house, which is adjacent to a provincial election office, at the time of the attack but his family was home and the house was hit during the assault, an aide said. There are no reports of casualties, Reuters reports.
At least two suicide bombings on the election office were followed by a lengthy gun battle between the Taliban and Afghan security forces. The Taliban, which claimed credit for the attack, has promised bombings and assassinations in the run up to Afghanistan’s April 5 presidential elections. With outgoing president Hamid Karzai barred from running for another term, the election is set to be the country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power.
Ghani, a former World Bank official, said on Twitter that his family was not harmed in the attack.
[Reuters]
- How to Help Victims of the Texas School Shooting
- TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022
- What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe
- Column: The U.S. Failed Miserably on COVID-19. Canada Shows It Didn't Have to Be That Way
- N.Y. Will Soon Require Businesses to Post Salaries in Job Listings. Here's What Happened When Colorado Did It
- The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2022
- ‘We Are in a Moment of Reckoning.’ Amanda Nguyen on Taking the Fight for Sexual Violence Survivors to the U.N.