KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Taliban carried out a suicide car bombing in central Afghanistan, killing 12 people and wounding more than 150 others, Afghan officials said Sunday.
The attack came on the same day that representatives of the Taliban attended an all-Afghan peace conference at a resort in Doha, Qatar -- the first such talks in which Afghan government officials have participated.
The talks, which continue today, aim to break the ice for direct negotiations on Afghanistan's political future after an expected U.S. military withdrawal.
The Afghan officials were attending in a personal capacity and not as government representatives. The insurgents who control or contest half of the country have rebuffed calls by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for direct peace talks.
The Taliban, which imposed their vision of Islamic theocracy for five years before being toppled by U.S.-backed forces in 2001, consider the Afghan government a puppet of the U.S. and have preferred to deal with the Americans directly. The Afghan government, meanwhile, largely sees the Taliban as a proxy force under the influence of neighboring Pakistan.
Many of those attending the talks in Doha on Sunday, from each side, arrived with stories of personal loss and grievance about the war that began in 2001.
"It is important to give all sides the opportunity to see how things have changed over the past 18 years," said Sultan Barakat, the director of the Doha institute that organized the event with a German foundation. "Eighteen years is not a short time, but war tends to trap people into imperceptions."
Among the Afghan participants are current and former senior officials who lost family members to suicide bombings, and a media executive who saw a bus full of his employees go up in flames.
On the Taliban side of the talks, several of the delegates spent more than a decade detained at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Their deputy leader in charge of the peace efforts, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who did not attend Sunday, was imprisoned in Pakistan for nearly 10 years.
The militants have stories of relatives and friends lost to raids and bombings by U.S. and Afghan forces. And they believe so staunchly in their fight against what they see as a foreign occupation that even the son of their latest supreme leader, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, is believed to have carried out a suicide bombing.
Most of Sunday's talks took place in private sessions, but participants described the atmosphere as respectful, even if the exchanges at times grew tense.
Members of the Afghan delegation said they had heard more assurances from the Taliban that they would respect women's right to work and to attend school. When in power, the Taliban did not allow women to do either. But in the main session Sunday, at meals and during tea breaks, senior Taliban officials mingled with female delegates, including Afghanistan's first female governor.
Afghans praised Taliban officials for engaging in discussions on issues rather than reading from prepared statements.
Nader Nadery, the chairman of the Afghan civil service commission, mentioned his own torture under the Taliban, but he also acknowledged the suffering of the Taliban officials across from him during their years of detention.
"I have the courage to forgive, as I know your members have suffered, too," Nadery said he told those at the gathering.
Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi, a member of the Taliban delegation, accused the Afghan side of being selective when speaking of civilian casualties. He said Afghan officials and media played down the civilian toll caused in rural areas by Afghan and American operations.
"The pain from all sides, whether it is the night raids or the bombings, that is why we are here," Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban delegation, said in an interview. "All sides have pain. The end of that pain is in ending the occupation."
Abdul Matin Bek, an Afghan Cabinet member attending the talks, knows that pain. His father, a member of parliament, was killed in the suicide bombing of a funeral in 2011.
Bek said his travels around the country had shown that Afghans demand an end to the war. He hoped the current dialogue would lead to direct negotiations to achieve that.
"It is not easy for me to sit across from people who have killed my father," he said. "But we have to end this."
Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. peace envoy to Afghanistan, said the U.S. will resume its own talks with the Taliban on Tuesday. He praised the progress on a time frame for the withdrawal of international troops from the country, on the Taliban's counterterrorism assurances, on direct Afghan government and Taliban peace negotiations, and on a permanent cease-fire.
TALIBAN TARGETS
Sunday's car bombing was seen as a bid by the Taliban to increase their leverage in the talks. A Taliban spokesman said the group targeted an intelligence department compound in Ghazni, the capital of the province of the same name.
A provincial council member, Hasan Raza Yousafi, confirmed that the car bomb exploded near the compound. He said the dead included eight security personnel.
A spokesman for the southeastern Ghazni province, Aref Noori, said by phone that more than 30 students from a nearby high school were among the wounded. The provincial health department chief, Zahir Shah Nekmal, said most of the injured suffered cuts and abrasions from broken glass.
The bombing followed an explosion Saturday in western Ghor province, where a roadside mine killed seven children, the youngest of whom was 5 years old.
Abdul Hai Khateby, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said the Taliban planted the mine, apparently to thwart a planned Afghan military offensive to retake nearby areas under the militants' control. The children were local shepherds who happened to be moving their herd along the road when the mine exploded, he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Amir Shah and Kathy Gannon of The Associated Press; by Mujib Mashal of The New York Times; and by Eltaf Najafizada of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 07/08/2019