Fourteen people were killed in bombing attacks in Afghan towns on Thursday, including ten at a mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, the second assault on a Shiite site this week. The number of bomb attacks in Afghanistan has decreased ever since the Taliban retook power in August, but the jihadist Islamic State group has declared several since then.

Grisly images of victims being brought to hospital from the Seh Dokan mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif were posted on social media. The images, which could not be independently confirmed, showed a scene scattered with shards of glass.

“There are at least 25 casualties,” Zabihullah Noorani, the chairman of Balkh province’s communications and cultural department, told AFP. According to a police spokesman, ten persons were murdered and fifteen were injured. Separately, a bomb in Kunduz city killed at least four people and injured 18.

According to provincial police spokesman Obaidullah Abedi, the incident was triggered by a bicycle bomb that was detonated near a truck transporting mechanics for a Taliban combat unit. Afghanistan’s Shiite Hazara population, which accounts for 10 to 20% of the country’s 38 million inhabitants, has long been the subject of attacks, some of which have been placed on the Taliban and others on IS.

Two blasts outside a school in a Shiite neighborhood of Kabul on Tuesday killed at least six people and injured 25 others. No group has claimed responsibility for any of this week’s attacks. Since seizing power, the Taliban have regularly raided suspected IS hideouts in the eastern Nangarhar province.

Taliban officials insist their forces have defeated IS, but analysts say the jihadist group remains a key security challenge. It has claimed responsibility for some of Afghanistan’s bloodiest strikes in recent years.

Last May, three bombs burst near a school in Kabul’s Shiite-dominated Dasht-e-Barchi area, killing at least 85 people, mostly female students, and injuring around 300.

None organization claimed responsibility, but in October 2020, IS acknowledged to carrying out a suicide assault on a school in the same location, killing 24 people, including pupils. In May 2020, the organization was implicated for a brutal attack on a maternity ward of a nearby hospital, which killed 25 people, including new mothers.