Fifteen people, including six children, were killed in southern Afghanistan yesterday when a bomb tore apart a bus in the latest in a growing series of attacks blamed on Taliban forces.
The bombing, near the town of Lashkargar, was one of the most serious attacks against civilians since the defeat of the Taliban regime in December 2001.
While relative prosperity has returned to Kabul in the past 20 months, much of the rest of Afghanistan, particularly the south, has fallen back into the hands of competing warlords and the security situation is rapidly deteriorating.
Provincial government officials in the south said they believed the bomb on the bus went off accidentally as it was being carried to Lashkargar, west of Kandahar, possibly for an attack planned in the town for Afghanistan’s independence day next week. The bomber was apparently also killed.
In a separate incident, Afghan government forces said they had shot dead 16 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in gun battles in the province of Khost, on the Pakistani border. It was one of the biggest encounters with Taliban gunmen in the area since the collapse of the regime.
The gunfight, which lasted several hours, began on Tuesday night with an attack on a border patrol base in Shinkai in which two Afghan border police were killed by heavy machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Two Arabs, apparently from al-Qaeda, were captured, according to Major Ghafar of the border police office.
”In the past, they have staged small-scale attacks, but this one was the most serious of all,” he said, adding that the attack had been coordinated by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former Taliban minister and powerful commander based in eastern Afghanistan.
Police in Kabul also said yesterday that two student Taliban sympathisers had been killed and another wounded in an explosion at their home as they tried to make a car bomb. The three were students at the Kabul Medical Institute.
The deaths came only two days after Nato troops, on their first mission outside Europe, took control of the international security force which has been policing Kabul. For now the force is still confined to the capital but it is under pressure to extend its mandate across the rest of Afghanistan as the country descends into the warlord violence that has shaped much of its recent history.
Aid workers are increasingly concerned about working in the southern Pashtun provinces, around areas such as Lashkargar, where support for the Taliban and anti-western feeling has traditionally been strongest.
Last week 10 Afghan staff from an aid agency were assaulted in Maiwand, near Kandahar. Two days later six soldiers and an Afghan driver working for the American aid agency Mercy Corps were killed in a remote area of Helmand, near the Pakistani border. The UN promptly halted its missions in two border districts in the south, citing a series of attacks on aid workers. There is every sign that more attacks will follow. Leaflets distributed by the ”Taliban mojahedin” near the southern border town of Spin Boldak have threatened death for any Afghan who works with the Americans.
The paper was signed by Mohammed Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban who has evaded capture for nearly two years.
On Tuesday the Associated Press reported that it had a received a message from Mullah Omar attacking western aid agencies as the ”greatest enemies of Islam and humanity”.
In part the anti-western feeling in southern Afghanistan stems from a feeling shared by many of the southern Pashtun tribes that they are excluded from the political process in Kabul, which is still dominated by the Northern Alliance, in particular the powerful defence minister, Field Marshal Mohammed Qasim Fahim.
In a pessimistic report this month the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based thinktank, said this sense of exclusion and mounting frustration jeopardised the first national elections due to be held next June. The political rise of clerics in neighbouring Pakistan has only helped to smooth the way for the resurgence of the Taliban.
”The risk of destabilisation has been given added weight by the re-emergence of senior Taliban commanders who are ready to capitalise on popular discontent and whose long-time allies now govern the Pakistani provinces bordering Afghanistan,” the group said. – Guardian Unlimited Â