Smoke rising from a suicide attack by Taliban fighters in Ghazni in 2014. By that point in the war, 100 suicide attacks were reported every year.
The new government brought together the bombers families at a publicized event, alienating their actions but praising those who have suffered at their hands.
Hussain had just arrived at his office in Afghanistan s capital when the world seemed to explode around him. It was the morning of May 31, 2017 and a truck bomb had just detonated, boring a crater in the earth, killing more than 150 people, most of them civilians, and releasing a shock wave that shattered glass across the city. Hussain suffered head and leg wounds in the blast, one of the largest in two decades of war, and was in constant anguish during months of surgery. The still-lingering pain was made more acute this past week when Hussain watched the new acting minister of interior — Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the very group accused of carrying out the attack — honoring the people who had consigned him to a life of agony: the Taliban s ranks of suicide bombers. Instead of asking for forgiveness, they are commemorating suicide bombers, said Hussain, who asked to be identified by first name only out of fear of retribution from the Taliban. And I will never forgive. On Tuesday, the Taliban government brought together families of suicide bombers at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, praising the deaths of their children and siblings in the fight against the U.S. backed coalition and Afghan government, and giving them condolence payments and a promise of land. The new government s decision to publicly memorialize its suicide bomb squads seemed to be both an effort to appease the aggrieved families for the movement s use of their loved ones as weapons and an overt attempt to rewrite the history of the war by championing the bombers deaths as the highest level of sacrifice. In short, it sought to professionalize the role of suicide bomber. Their sacrifices are for religion, for the country and for Islam, Mr. Haqqani told the crowd in the same ballroom of the gilded hilltop lodge attacked by the Taliban in 2011 and 2018.
And while the event delivered a message to the Taliban supporters, it was bound to alienate parts of the Afghan population grappling with the group s return — especially the families of the victims. After more than 40 years of war, the ceremony was one more painful reminder for a population already traumatized by a slew of armed actors, including the Soviet Army and the U.S. - led Western coalition that invaded in 2001. The suicide attack is by itself a shameful, cowardly and inhuman act. And justifying such a horrific action to prove yourself legitimate is also certainly shameful, said Yaser Qobadiyan, whose sister was killed by the Islamic State in a suicide attack in Kabul in 2018 and whose father died in a 2006 car bombing presumed to have been carried out by the Taliban. The Taliban should give land and money as compensation for the families of victims of their suicide attacks, he added. The public display also raised questions of how the Taliban will remember the tens of thousands of soldiers killed and wounded while serving in the previous government's military, and how — or if — their family members will be compensated. This leaves the newly appointed minister of martyrs and disabled affairs, Abdul Majeed Akhund, in a perilous position, having to reckon with two versions of the war and the meaning of sacrifice for those who participated on both sides. Killing others through one s own self destruction has been a tool of war for centuries, but according to the United Nations the first suicide attack believed to be carried out in Afghanistan did not occur until Sept. 9, 2001. That s when foreign operatives of Al Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance group fighting the Taliban.