According to a medical official, a massive explosion in a Shiite Muslim mosque in northern Afghanistan killed at least ten worshippers and injured another 40.

Dr. Ghawsuddin Anwari, chief of the main hospital in northern Mazar-e-Sharif, said the dead and injured were transported in ambulances and private cars. The explosion occurred at the Sai Doken mosque north of Mazar-e-Sharif as hundreds of worshippers knelt in prayer during Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset.

A roadside bomb exploded earlier Thursday in Kabul, injuring two youngsters. Additionally, it blasts targeted the country's Shiite population.

While neither attack claimed responsibility, the explosions bore all the hallmarks of a lethal Islamic State affiliate known as Islamic State in Khorasan Province or IS-K.

According to a tweet from Kabul police spokesman Khalid Zadran, the device detonated in the median strip of a road in a predominantly Shiite district in the western part of the capital. Two days prior, numerous bombings targeting educational institutions killed at least six people, most of them children, and injured 17.

Advocates representing the Hazara minority demanded an end to the massacres. Hazaras, who make up approximately 9% of Afghanistan's 36 million population, are singled out for being targeted due to their ethnic origin - distinct from other ethnic groups such as Tajik and Uzbek and the Pashtun majority - and religion. The majority of Hazaras are Shiite Muslims, reviled by Sunni Muslim radicals such as the Islamic State organization, and face discrimination in a Sunni-dominated country.

Previously, the Islamic State affiliate targeted schools, particularly in the predominantly Shiite Dasht-e-Barchi area. In May of last year, months before the Taliban took control of Kabul, two bombings outside their school, again in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood, killed over 60 children, predominantly girls.

Dasht-e-Barchi and other western Kabul neighborhoods are home to Afghanistan's Shiite minorities, primarily targeted by Islamic State affiliate sympathizers; however, no one has claimed responsibility for the recent bombings.