KANDAHAR – Fifteen police and an intelligence agent were killed Saturday in a string of devastating attacks in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar which were claimed by the Taliban. The attacks, which played out over several hours and left 45 people injured, involved several suicide bombers armed with guns and grenades firing on the main police headquarters after occupying a wedding hall opposite.
Three car bombs were also detonated near the police office and a further three were defused before they could go off, officials said. The carnage came despite an influx of international troops into the area following an operation last year to clear Taliban strongholds in what is seen as one of the key battlegrounds in the ten-year war. It was swiftly condemned by President Hamid Karzai “in the strongest possible terms”.
“Fifteen people were killed and 45 others suffered injuries and some of the wounded are in critical condition,” Kandahar provincial governor Tooryalai Wesa told reporters. He later clarified that the 15 were all police, and that an agent from the National Directorate of Security (NDS) had also been killed, adding that the fighting had stopped. A local police commander, General Salem Ehsas, said the attackers “parked six explosive-laden vehicles near police HQ — they detonated three but security forces defused the explosives placed in the others”.
Amid conflicting reports on the details of what happened, a spokesman for the Taliban, Yousuf Ahmadi, said the group, for whom Kandahar is a traditional stronghold, was behind the attack. “We sent six men to the building, they attacked police HQ and blew themselves up,” he said. “We also detonated six explosive-packed cars outside the police headquarters.” As the violence raged, frightened locals hid inside their homes in a bid to avoid injury.
An AFP reporter at the chaotic scene saw attackers firing rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles and machine guns from the sixth floor of the wedding hall at the police headquarters. He later said that police had entered the building and there had been two loud explosions. Kandahar, the biggest city in southern Afghanistan, is a traditional Taliban heartland which is hit by frequent instability despite an influx of foreign troops in a major operation against militants in recent months. Earlier this week in Kandahar, a US customs officer died in an attack on a customs office.
Last month, the deputy provincial governor Abdul Latif Ashna was killed on his way to work by a suicide bomber. The deputy mayor of Kandahar, Noor Ahmad Nazari, was killed in October, six months after his predecessor was assassinated, and the local police chief has faced several recent attempts on his life. Some experts argue that success in Kandahar is key to the wider effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan because the Pashtun-dominated province, which borders Pakistan, is its traditional stronghold.
They say the insurgency could not be sustained if it were to be defeated in Kandahar province. There are around 140,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan fighting Taliban militants, who were ousted from power by a US-led invasion in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. Foreign soldiers are due to start a limited withdrawal from some more stable provinces of Afghanistan from July ahead of a planned transition of responsibility for security to Afghan forces in 2014.
