• A well-known Afghan preacher who favoured female education and backed the Taliban was assassinated.
• According to reports, Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani perished in a suicide bombing in Kabul.
• According to Taliban insiders who spoke to Reuters, a guy who detonated explosives concealed in an artificial plastic limb targeted the religious leader.

 A well-known Afghan preacher who favoured female education and backed the Taliban was assassinated.

According to reports, Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani perished in a suicide bombing in Kabul.

According to Taliban insiders who spoke to Reuters, a guy who detonated explosives concealed in an artificial plastic limb targeted the religious leader.

The Islamic State (IS) organisation, which had previously vowed to kill the preacher, took credit for the attack and claimed that it occurred in his office.

The attack happened inside an Islamic seminary in the Afghan capital, according to local media.

Sheikh Haqqani was an ardent supporter of the Taliban administration in Afghanistan and a vocal opponent of the IS-K, an IS regional affiliate that operates in Afghanistan and opposes the Taliban’s leadership.

He is one of the most well-known individuals to have perished in the nation since the Taliban retook power last year.

A senior Taliban official told the news agency Reuters that the strike was “a very major loss for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and that officials were looking into its perpetrators.

He was unrelated to the network of the Haqqani insurgent group in Afghanistan despite having the same name.

In support of female education, a hotly debated topic in Afghanistan, the religious authority had earlier issued a fatwa or religious decree.

Earlier this year, in an interview with Secunder Kermani of the BBC, he claimed that Afghan women and girls had to have access to school: “The sharia [law] contains no rationale for prohibiting female education. Absolutely no excuse.”

“All the holy scriptures have indicated that female education is permissible and necessary, since, for instance, if a woman is sick and needs treatment in an Islamic environment like Afghanistan or Pakistan, it is preferable if she is treated by a female doctor,” the speaker continued.

The Taliban have ordered that girls’ secondary schools remain shuttered in all but a small number of the nation’s provinces.

Sheikh Haqqani has previously escaped two murder attempts, the most recent of which occurred in 2020 after IS claimed responsibility for an explosion that left at least seven people dead at a religious school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

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