KABUL, 10 June 2003 — Afghanistan’s ousted Taleban regime is calling on the army and police to join the hard-line Islamic movement in its campaign against President Hamid Karzai and US-led forces, an official said yesterday. Pamphlets have been distributed in the restive southern province of Zabul, part of the former heartland of the Taleban movement, said Mohammad Omar, deputy governor of Zabul.
“For the past several days we have been seeing these leaflets here,” Omar told Reuters by telephone from Zabul. “They have called on the army and police force to join the Taleban to fight Karzai’s government and coalition forces instead.” Omar said the pamphlets also warned that those who failed to follow the orders of the Taleban would be killed.
“At the beginning, the wording is very mild and encouraging, but at the end they threaten death to those who do not listen to the Taleban.”
Western diplomats are concerned that Taleban guerrillas and sympathizers are growing in number and confidence in the south and southeast of the country. Afghan officials blame the increase in attacks this year against US-led forces, international peacekeepers and aid workers on “criminals” and “terrorists” drawing support from radical elements over the border in Pakistan.
Omar said the pamphlets had so far failed to lure anyone from the army or police, although numbers had dwindled recently due to unpaid salaries since the arrival to power of Karzai shortly after the fall of the Taleban in late 2001. He said Taleban “fugitives” were moving in small groups in remote parts of Zabul. He blamed them for a series of attacks in the province on aid agencies and other targets.
Meanwhile, at least three Afghans were killed when a bomb exploded in the vehicle they were traveling in, the latest in a series of blasts that have rocked the south of the country in recent months, state media reported yesterday. The explosion ripped through a vehicle in the Panjwaye district of Kandahar province, the Arman-e-Millie daily newspaper reported without saying when the blast occurred. The government mouthpiece described the situation in Panjwaye area as “insecure”.
Kandahar province has been rocked by a series of attacks and explosions since the start of the year which the government has blamed on remnants of Taleban and the Al-Qaeda network it sheltered.
Kabul TV reported late on Sunday that two more Taleban guerrillas, including senior commander Shafi Abdul Rahim, had died in subsequent clashes in the area. But Khalid Pashtun, spokesman for Kandahar’s governor, denied Rahim was dead.
In another development, a German Army spokesman, responding to public criticism over the suicide bomb attack which killed four German soldiers in Kabul on Saturday, said yesterday that there was no absolute protection against suicide attacks. Maj. Guenther Bender, spokesman for the German troop contingent in the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in Kabul, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur radio service: “We cannot protect ourselves when here or there a lone attacker with huge quantities of explosives blows himself up.”
It was even questionable whether an armored vehicle “would be able to protect the soldiers against injury in view of the huge amount of explosives”, Bender said, in apparent reference to questions raised about why the soldiers were not better protected. Besides the four killed, 29 soldiers were wounded in Saturday’s attack in which a taxi loaded with explosives was detonated near a bus carrying the German soldiers to Kabul airport.
