Mohammad Dawood Muzammil’s killing comes a day after he met prime authorities officers visiting from capital Kabul.
A suicide assault in Afghanistan’s northern Balkh province has killed its Taliban governor, police mentioned.
“Two folks, together with Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the governor of Balkh, have been killed in an explosion this morning,” police spokesman Asif Waziri mentioned on Thursday.
Wazir mentioned the blast occurred on the second ground of his workplace within the provincial capital of Mazar-i-Sharif.
“It was a suicide assault. We do not have info as to how the suicide bomber reached the workplace of the governor,” he mentioned, including that two folks had been additionally wounded.
The killing of Muzammil, recognized for his resistance to the ISIL (ISIS) group within the space, got here a day after he met prime authorities officers visiting from capital Kabul.
The killing makes Muzammil one of many highest-ranking figures slain because the Taliban stormed again to energy in 2021.
Violence throughout Afghanistan has dropped dramatically because the Taliban seized management, however the safety state of affairs has once more deteriorated with ISIL claiming a number of lethal assaults.
Authorities deployed additional safety on the governorate and forbade journalists from taking images, a correspondent of the AFP information company reported from close to the positioning of the blast.
Muzammil was “martyred in an explosion by the enemies of Islam”, tweeted Taliban authorities’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
Muzammil was initially appointed governor of the japanese province of Nangarhar, the place he led the struggle towards ISIL, earlier than being moved to Balkh final yr.
On Wednesday, he met two deputy prime ministers and different senior officers visiting Balkh to assessment a significant irrigation undertaking in northern Afghanistan, in accordance with a authorities assertion.
The ISIL has emerged as the largest safety problem to the Taliban authorities since final yr, finishing up assaults towards Afghan civilians in addition to foreigners and international pursuits.
ISIL says it’s preventing to ascertain a world Islamic “caliphate” as an alternative of the Taliban’s extra inward-looking objective of ruling an impartial Afghanistan.
A number of assaults have rocked Balkh, together with in Mazar-i-Sharif final yr, some claimed by the armed group.
In January, a suicide bomber killed at the very least 10 folks when he blew himself up close to the international ministry in Kabul, in an assault claimed by the group.
Not less than 5 Chinese language nationals had been wounded in December when gunmen stormed a lodge fashionable with businesspeople in Kabul. ISIL claimed accountability for the raid.
One other assault on Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul in December that Islamabad denounced as an “assassination try” towards its ambassador was additionally claimed by the group.
Two Russian embassy employees members had been killed in a suicide bombing outdoors their mission in September in one more assault claimed by ISIL.
