KABUL — A suicide bomber detonated explosives during Friday prayers in a mosque packed with army troops in Afghanistan’s southeastern Khost province, killing at least 10 of them, a government spokesman said.
But a security official said the toll could be at least twice as high, with another 30 wounded in the attack on a sprawling main army base in the Mandozai district near the border with Pakistan.
“The initial report we have suggests that 10 have been killed. It happened during Friday prayers,” said Talib Mangal, a spokesman for the governor of Khost.
The attack came three days after 55 Islamic scholars and clerics were killed by a suicide bomber in a hotel in Kabul while marking the birth of Islam’s prophet Muhammad.
[Death toll rises in suicide bombing of Islamic gathering in Kabul]
No group has asserted responsibility for either attack. Ordinary Afghans and the U.S.-backed government are grappling with the increasing militancy of the Taliban and Islamic State insurgencies.
A Defense Ministry spokesman, Sayed Ghafoor Javid, said in a telephone interview that a helicopter was sent to evacuate the casualties, but he said did not have a firm figure on number of dead and wounded.
Army bases have come under attack by Taliban militants in recent years, but Friday’s incident targeting a mosque was the first of its kind in such a facility. The Islamic State extremist group, however, has hit numerous mosques and gathering sites of Shiite Muslims in recent years, killing hundreds of people.
Friday’s attack appears likely to be seen as another intelligence failure for the Afghan security apparatus, which has suffered heavy casualties in recent years. President Ashraf Ghani weeks ago put the number of deaths of national security forces over the last four years at 28,000.
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