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Suicide bomber shot dead as Taliban fighters gather for passports
ISIS, rebels refusing to submit to the Talib conquest, former Afghan army special forces? A girl who just wanted to go to high school? Trapped Americans taking their vengeance? Lots of possibilities to give the Talib Lions of Islam nightmares...
[AlAhram] A would-be jacket wallah was rubbed out Thursday outside Kabul's main passport office, police said, as hundreds of Taliban
...Arabic for students...
 fighters lined up for travel documents on a day reserved exclusively for their applications.

"He was identified and killed at a checkpoint at the entrance," Mobin Khan, front man for Kabul police, told AFP.

There have been several attacks against Taliban fighters since their return to power in August -- most claimed by the local chapter of the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 group.

Around 200 Taliban fighters had gathered at the passport office from dawn after authorities announced that Thursdays would be set aside exclusively for them to apply for passports.

It was unclear why the fighters wanted passports -- or where they planned to travel to -- as security operatives barred news hounds from interviewing them.

Civilians who arrived to process their applications were held back or sent home by Taliban security, who also tore up documents of some as they pressed to enter.

"Issuing passports to the Taliban members was cancelled due to overcrowding," said Qari Shafiullah Tassal, a front man for the office.
...but definitely not because of stray ears and bits of intestine strewn across the landscape...
Many people were also falsely claiming they had Taliban links, he told AFP.

Taliban fighters were also given the opportunity Thursday to apply for passports in the southern city of Kandahar, according to an AFP news hound there.

Taliban authorities stopped issuing passports after the hardline Islamic group returned to power on August 15, citing staff issues, faulty equipment and a lack of supplies.

Operations resumed on Sunday but hundreds of thousands of Afghans are desperate to flee a growing humanitarian crisis in the country.
Tolo News explains that nothing happened:
The Ministry of Interior Affairs said that an attack was stopped in front of the passport department on Thursday afternoon in Kabul.

An early message to media from a government source said there had been a boom-mobile, but this was later changed.

The Interior Ministry tweeted the following:

"An attack was prevented in front of the Central Passport Department in Kabul. This afternoon, an attacker who tried to enter the Central Passport Department was eliminated by the security personnel of the Central Passport Department. No one was killed or injured in the attack."

"Before the (attacker) reached his goal, he was targeted and eliminated. The attack took just minutes and ended up with the killing of the attacker," said Alam Gul Haqqani, head of the Passport Department.

Earlier, a front man for the Kabul security department, Gen Mobin told TOLOnews that the attack was due to a boom-mobileing.

Posted by: trailing wife 2021-12-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=620743