Taliban Wage Deadly Attacks in 3 Afghan Provinces

By Alissa J. Rubin, The New York Times 

12 May 2014

KABUL, Afghanistan — On the first day of their “spring offensive,” the Taliban mounted attacks in three provinces that killed at least 11 people on Monday. In a fourth province, the families of two would-be suicide bombers turned them in to the police, helping to forestall what would have probably been another attack.

The attacks were a reminder that as the last of the Western troops withdraw in the coming months, the Afghan forces will be in an unrelenting fight just to hold ground. And it raised the prospect of intensified violence in the coming weeks during the runoff phase of the Afghan presidential election, which the Taliban vowed to disrupt.

In a report on the Taliban insurgency released Monday, the International Crisis Group forecast “escalating violence and insurgent attacks” after American and allied troops complete their withdrawal this year.

The report noted that the Taliban had been able to muster larger forces, and that in some areas the insurgents and the Afghan security forces were inflicting nearly equal casualties on each other, in another suggestion of increased insurgent strength.

One attack on Monday hit just as people were settling in to work at the Justice Ministry’s provincial offices in Jalalabad, according to people in the area. Three men wearing suicide vests and armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades killed the two police guards at the building’s entrance and stormed in.

In the course of the battle with the Afghan security forces, which lasted four to five hours, three civil servants were killed, along with a student and a third member of the security forces. The lasting effect of the attack will be felt for months, because a part of the building caught fire and the ministry’s paper records were reduced to ashes, said Col. Abdul Rafi Oruzgani, the head of Nangarhar Province’s police criminal division.

The Taliban, in a statement they emailed to journalists announcing their spring offensive, said that only two fighters were involved in the Jalalabad attack, but the Afghan police said there were three.

In an attack in Helmand Province, the Taliban appear to have infiltrated a team of police in Sangin District, an area where the Afghan forces have been struggling to keep the insurgency at bay.

The attack began at a security checkpoint with the shooting of a guard in a tower, said a spokesman for the governor, who said he believed that the battle left three policemen dead and four wounded. However, local people said all seven officers were killed.

“The report we have is that there are internal links between the police and the Taliban and that paved the way for Taliban to kill seven policemen,” said Hajji Mira Jan, a member of the district council in Sangin. “They were all shot, and two of my cousins were among those killed. It is a tragic incident.”

In Uruzgan Province, two imams in two separate districts were shot by men on motorcycles. Both imams had refused to preach Taliban-ordered sermons, and local people said they believed that was the reason they had been targeted. Dost Mohammed Nayab, a spokesman for the governor, said that neither man was connected with the government.

One planned attack appeared to have been foiled when two Afghan men who had been trained as suicide bombers in Pakistan stopped by in Sharana, the capital of Paktika Province, to bid their families farewell before conducting their attacks.

Their families turned them in to the provincial office of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, where they confessed, according to a statement from the service.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Khalid Alokozay from Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

© 2014 The New York Times Company

Featured Image: Afghan security officers at a Justice Ministry building in Jalalabad on Monday after it was stormed by Taliban insurgents. (Parwiz/Reuters)

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