Islamic State group claims deadly attack on Chinese restaurant in Afghanistan

Kabul: A bombing claimed by the Islamic State wing in Afghanistan killed at least seven people and wounded more than a dozen in a Chinese restaurant in Kabul on Monday, officials said, in a sign of the group's persistent threat despite the Afghan government's claim to have vanquished it.

The blast ripped through a noodle restaurant on a busy street of central Kabul filled with shops selling flowers, antiquities and rugs Monday afternoon. A single attacker detonated his explosive vest 30 minutes after entering the restaurant, according to a statement released by the Islamic State group through its media wing.

A spokesperson for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Abdul Mateen Qani, told The New York Times that seven people had been killed, including a Chinese citizen. He also said that the assault had been carried out by a single attacker from the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, the group's Afghanistan affiliate.

Unlike most Western countries, China has maintained sustained diplomatic ties with the Taliban administration in Afghanistan. In 2023, China became the first country to appoint an ambassador in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power in 2021, and has signed mining contracts to tap into vast Afghan oil and mineral reserves. China has also vowed to include Afghanistan in the Belt and Road Initiative, its trillion-dollar global infrastructure project. Its foreign minister, Wang Yi, even visited Kabul last summer.

But China has grown increasingly wary about potential insecurity in Afghanistan, even though the government has control of large swaths of the country and has tried to woo foreign investors back. China now advises its citizens against traveling to Afghanistan.

ISIS-K said it has targeted Chinese citizens in retaliation for Beijing's oppression of Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China, and has criticized the Afghan government's dealings with Beijing. In 2022, its militants injured at least five Chinese citizens in an attack on a hotel popular with Chinese visitors.

"ISIS-K sees the Taliban-China relationship as one of the biggest betrayals of a jihadist group," Iftikhar Firdous, executive director of the research platform Khorasan Diary, said about the partnerships made by the Taliban since the group took over Afghanistan in 2021.

Firdous said the attacks pointed to "a growing anti-Chinese jihadist nexus in the region, of which ISIS-K is the primary benefactor."

China has urged the Taliban government to engage in "more visible and verifiable actions to dismantle and eliminate all terrorist organizations based in Afghanistan."

"China strongly condemns and firmly opposes all forms of terrorism and supports Afghanistan and regional countries in jointly combating all forms of terrorist violence," Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a news briefing Tuesday.

Security forces heavily guarded the area around the Chinese noodle restaurant Tuesday, as residents were still cleaning broken glass littering the street. Businesses had reopened, with employees in flower shops making bouquets and blood stains still visible on the windows of nearby boutiques.

Emergency, an Italian nonprofit medical group operating in Kabul, said it had received 20 people at its surgical center Monday, including seven who were dead on arrival. A child was among the dead, Emergency's country director, Dejan Panic, said in a statement.