ISIS claimed responsibility Tuesday for the Monday suicide bomb attack against the gathering of Afghanistan’s top imams, calling them “tyrant clerics.”
The terrorist group claimed responsibility in a post on an ISIS-affiliated website for the attack on the Afghan Ulema Council, which killed seven people, including one policeman, and wounded at least 20 others, according to The Associated Press. ISIS, which has enforced a brutal Islamic extremist regime upon every area it conquered in the past, accused the gathering of about 2,000 imams of tyranny in the wake of a fatwah, or Islamic ruling, that the council issued denouncing terrorism and forbidding suicide bombings and other violent acts. (RELATED: Scottish Muslim Writer Threatened With Beheading For Claiming Quran Doesn’t Require Ramadan Fasting)
The Taliban, which announced its spring offensive in Afghanistan in April, denied any involvement in the attack and rejected the clerics’ fatwah against “the ongoing war in Afghanistan.” The clerics called on the Taliban to cooperate with peace offers from the Afghan government. The Taliban, however, denounced the meeting of the clerics as “an American process, which was planned, organized, financed and led by the invaders,” and demanded that they instead support the Taliban against the U.S.-backed Afghan government, which they condemned as “invaders,” according to AP.
Both ISIS and the Taliban seek to overthrow the Afghan government and expel U.S. troops and influence in the region in order to establish an Islamic extremist regime. The two groups differ greatly, however, in ideology and in their preferred methods
ISIS carried out the attack on the clerics less than an hour after the council publicly issued their fatwah.
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