Taliban Bombs Afghan Official’s Compound

09/27/2006

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (AP) - A Taliban suicide bomber killed 18 people outside a provincial governor’s compound Tuesday, including several Muslim pilgrims set to travel to Mecca - another in a series of attacks directed at senior figures in President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-backed government.

On Wednesday, a suicide car bomber targeted a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan, wounding one civilian, a police official said.

No troops were injured in the blast in the southern city of Kandahar, said Abdul Ali Khan. One military vehicle was damaged, he said.

The explosion happened a mile from the regional international reconstruction headquarters, Khan said.


Meanwhile, the blast at the doorstep of Helmand Gov. Mohammed Daoud Safi’s compound came on the same day a bombing against a NATO patrol in the Kabul area killed an Italian soldier and a child, and two weeks after militants assassinated a governor in eastern Afghanistan who had been a Karzai confidant.

Safi was inside the compound in Lashkar Gah but was not injured. Karzai was in Washington on Tuesday, meeting with President Bush.

Afghan soldiers stopped the bomber at the compound’s security gate, where he detonated his explosives, said the governor’s spokesman, Ghulam Muhiddin. The attacker had been walking toward a vehicle of the private military contractors who provide security for Safi, said Squadron Leader Jason Chalk, a NATO spokesman.

Nine Afghan soldiers and nine civilians were killed, said Rahmatullah Mohammdi, director of the hospital in Lashkar Gah. Seventeen people were wounded, he said.

Among the civilians waiting outside the compound were pilgrims seeking permission to travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Muhiddin said. The main mosque in Lashkar Gah is across from the compound.


Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, who claims to be a spokesman for Taliban affairs in southern Afghanistan, contacted The Associated Press and said the militant group was responsible for the attack. Ahmadi’s exact ties to the militants are not known.

Militants have stepped up attacks in southern Afghanistan in recent months, including the use of roadside and suicide bombs. Twenty-one people were killed in Lashkar Gah in August by a suicide bomber, and last week militants killed 19 construction workers riding on a bus in neighboring Kandahar province.

Although Muhiddin said he believed “innocent civilians and Afghan soldiers” were the targets Tuesday, the blast appeared to be another broadside fired toward a senior government figure.

Violent extremists have also been increasingly targeting Afghan officials, including the governor of eastern Paktia province - a friend of Karzai’s - who was killed in a Sept. 10 suicide bombing. A women’s rights activist, who was the Kandahar provincial director for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs, was killed Monday in a drive-by shooting.

Karzai sent Safi, a former member of Afghanistan’s National Security Council and like the president an ethnic Pashtun, to Helmand province last year to take over a region in the heart of the booming drug trade and the Taliban resurgence. Helmand’s former governor, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, has been accused of having links to drug gangs; he is now a lawmaker.


Two people were detained for questioning after Tuesday’s attack on the NATO patrol five miles south of Kabul.

A remote-control bomb planted under a bridge detonated when a three-vehicle military convoy passed by, said Ali Shah Paktiawal, the city’s police criminal director.

Chief Corp. Maj. Giorgio Langella was killed in the blast, and five Italian soldiers were wounded, two seriously, the Italian Defense Ministry said in Rome. A child riding in a car behind the NATO convoy was killed, NATO said. Four other civilians in the car were wounded.

Italy has some 1,600 troops in the 20,000-strong NATO-led force in Afghanistan.

An Italian soldier died and two were injured on Sept. 20 when their armored vehicle overturned on a steep incline near Kabul. Four Italian soldiers were wounded Sept. 8 by a roadside bomb in the western Farah province.


Although Taliban-linked militants have stepped up their attacks across Afghanistan the last several months, attacks in Kabul are still far rarer than in the country’s south - the focus of the most intense fighting since the ouster of the Taliban regime in a U.S.-led military campaign five years ago.

Attacks in the capital are mostly aimed at foreign military troops. On Sept. 8, a suicide car bomber rammed into a U.S. Humvee, killing 16 people, including two U.S. soldiers. That attack was Kabul’s deadliest since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban.

In other violence, seven armed men died in Paktika province Monday when an explosives vest one of them was carrying detonated in the Yousef Kheil district, said Gov. Mohammad Akram Akhpelwak. There were no other casualties.

A suicide bomber on foot killed himself Tuesday while trying to attack a vehicle carrying security workers traveling to the border in Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan, said Gen. Mohammad Ayub, the provincial police chief. No one else was wounded in the blast, he said.