Afghan police on Wednesday fired into the air to disperse protesters who tried to scale the walls of a building near the President’s palace as anger boiled over at the murder of seven members of the Hazara ethnic minority by militants.
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The marchers carried pictures of the victims, including two women and one child – a girl, whose coffin was carried by grieving women. A few of the bodies had their throats slit.
“We are showing the enemies of Afghanistan that you can not divide us by ethnicity, tribe, region and sect”, said Dadullah Babrak, a protest organizer.
Demonstrators said Hazara people were being killed every day on the roads between Ghazni, Bamyan and Wardak provinces to the west of Kabul, where the Taliban control of much of the countryside after most worldwide forces pulled out previous year.
They had walked around 10 kilometers (6 miles) through the rain, carrying the green-draped coffins of the four men, two women and child who were found with their heads almost cut off on Saturday in the southeastern province of Zabul.
The protesters were chanting death to supporters of terrorism in Afghanistan, while other protesters chanted death to supporters of the Taliban.
The United Nations has followed the Afghan government and the USA in condemning the killings, suggesting they may have been a war crime.
The demonstration, one of the biggest seen in Kabul in years, was peaceful but there was an angry mood directed at the Islamist militants blamed for the killings and the government that failed to prevent them.
The protesters called on Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah to resign, and said they would remain in Pashtunistan Square, outside the heavily fortified palace gates, until their demands were met.
Sayed Zafar Hasehmi, deputy spokesman of President Ashraf Ghani, told Al Jazeera that the security threat affects the entire nation and not any specific community.
“These senseless murders may amount to war crimes and the perpetrators must be held accountable”, Nicholas Haysom, the UN’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, said in a statement today. The Taliban has also splintered in recent months following the disclosure that the group’s longtime leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was dead.
Protests previously erupted over Ghani’s response to the fall of Kunduz as a few lawmakers called for his resignation in the wake of the militants’ most significant battlefield victory in the 14 years since the Taliban were ousted from power.
Yesterday the Afghan spy agency said its forces had freed eight other Hazaras who had been held hostage for months, but offered no further details.
Mujahid went on to assert that deadly clashes in the Afghan province over the past week were not between Taliban rival factions as had been reported in the media.
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“I promise to take revenge on the Taliban, Daesh and whoever committed this”, Ghani said of the beheadings.
