KABUL, 5 August 2004 — Powerful Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim yesterday said that he won’t support Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai in the elections scheduled for Oct. 9. Fahim’s comments came almost a week after Karzai rebuffed Fahim by not naming him as one of two vice presidential candidates.

Fahim was widely expected to be named as one of the vice presidential candidates, but at the last minute Karzai instead chose Ahmed Zia Massoud, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Russia and brother of the slain commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.

To ensure national unity, Fahim said he was supporting Karzai, but recently he discovered that Karzai want to continue his mission without Mujahedeen (holy fighters).

“I told Karzai that it would be a mistake if he wants to continue to rebuff Mujahedeen. Finally, Karzai obliged us to support Mohammad Yunis Qanuni (former education minister and a prominent figure in the Northern Alliance which fought the Taleban),” Fahim said.

He said that Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, another prominent figure from the Northern Alliance, is also supporting Qanuni. Last week, Qanuni announced his candidacy for the upcoming elections. Fahim and other leaders from the Northern Alliance supported Karzai during the Bonn conference and then during a Loya Jirga to become president.

Now there is one major presidential candidate from each important ethnic groups in Afghanistan — Karzai, a Pushtun; Qanuni, a Tajik; Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek and former Communist militia leader; and Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Shiite religious leader and commander from the Hazara ethnic group. In total there are 23 presidential candidates. The Joint Electoral Management Body has registered more than 8.5 million voters in Afghanistan so far.

Meanwhile, an Afghan aid worker and his driver were killed by unidentified gunmen in southeastern Afghanistan in the latest attack on humanitarian agencies, which have been increasingly targeted by militants.

A field officer working for a partner organization to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was shot dead in Tuesday’s attack on the road between Gardez, 105 km south of Kabul, and Zormat, a UNHCR spokesman said yesterday. His driver was seriously wounded and later died after being airlifted to the US military base at Bagram north of the capital, said Mohammad Nader Farhad.

Both men were employed by the Malteser charity, which worked alongside the UNHCR in the province of Paktia where around 20,000 Afghan refugees have returned to their homeland from the South Waziristan tribal agency in neighboring Pakistan.

Farhad said the victims were traveling in an unmarked car when they were attacked at around 5 p.m. (1230 GMT).

“We are extremely concerned about this security incident,” Farhad said, adding that Malteser had suspended its operations in the southeast of the country as a result. Malteser staff could not immediately be reached for comment.

The UNHCR has suspended staff travel in the southeast, although its operations in the area will continue. Many aid organizations have suspended travel and operations across large parts of the south and east of the country where militants including remnants of the ousted Taleban are most active.

The Medecins Sans Frontieres agency said last week it was leaving Afghanistan after 24 years because of security fears. Five of its staff were killed in an attack in the northwest of the country in June, although investigations suggest the murders were part of a local turf battle rather than Taleban efforts to derail aid work by targeting humanitarian workers.