Of Afghanistan’s 7,355 polling stations, nearly 1,000 are outside government control, according to security officials.
Participation is already expected to be low; only 190,000 out of an estimated 14 million voters signed up to vote in the first week of registration. Many voters are disappointed by the corruption rife within Afghan politics and by successive fraudulent elections.
Islamic State and the more firmly established Taliban carry out regular attacks, with the Taliban usually targeting the Afghan government and security forces and Islamic State targeting members of the country's Shiite Muslim minority, whom the affiliate perceives as apostates.
The relentless assaults underscore the struggles that Afghan security forces have faced to rein in the militant groups since the United States and NATO concluded their combat mission at the end of 2014. Both militant groups want to establish strict Islamic rule in Afghanistan.
“An incident doesn’t begin with the explosion — it begins with the cries of a mother, a sister, a wife at a home where a man who left alive in the morning is brought back in a coffin three hours later, his body blown to pieces,” Farahnaz Frotan, a reporter from ToloNews, wrote on Facebook after the funeral of a cameraman colleague. “All those who were blown to pieces today were men and women of work, from a generation full of dreams — a generation blown to pieces by suicide bombings.”