Taliban suicide team strikes NDS headquarters in Afghan city

[Valin]

FDD's Long War Journal

Bill Roggio

July 13, 2020

The Taliban has claimed credit for today’s suicide assault in the provincial capital of Samangan in northern Afghanistan. The attack belies U.S. officials’ claims that the Taliban has not been fighting in Afghanistan’s cities.

Afghan officials said that 10 people were killed and more than 50 were wounded after a Taliban suicide bomb detonated an explosive-packed vehicle outside of the headquarters of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in the city of Abyak, TOLONews reported. A team of three Taliban fighters then entered the NDS compound and battled Afghan forces before being killed.

The Taliban claimed credit for the assault on the NDS headquarters, and stated that “three heroes from the Martyrdom Battalion” carried it out, according to a statement that was released on Voice of Jihad. It called the target of the operation the “satanic intelligence nest in Samangan province.”

The Taliban celebrated its “martyrdom seeking” units in a video that was released in early June. Also, in mid-June, the Taliban called the Afghan government and those who support it “deviants … who are trained in the poisonous deviant beliefs of atheism, communism, secularism, democracy, and other satanic western and disbelieving ideologies in order to mislead the Muslims with their deviant ideologies.”

(Snip)