KABUL, 20 August 2004 — Pitched battles that broke out last weekend between the forces of warlord Ismail Khan and rival factional militia in western Afghanistan’s Herat province caused high casualties on both sides, the local intelligence chief said yesterday. “Casualties on both sides are very high,” said Nasir Ahmad Allaoui, addressing a press conference. He said 21 people were buried yesterday in Herat city, where he said thousands turned out for special services in the grand mosque.
Local police chief Ziauddin Muhmoodi said three people had already been buried in Herat and 11 others in Shindand district, one of the scenes of fierce fighting in recent days. He said 20 more bodies would be carried to Herat’s provincial capital, also named Herat, today. “Several hundred people are missing,” Muhmoodi added.
Meanwhile, an Afghan Defense Ministry official said a cease-fire in place since Tuesday afternoon between the forces of Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik and his Pushtun rival Amanullah Khan was still holding.
“Government officials are going to resume their work,” and the regular Afghan army, which is enforcing the cease-fire, as well as the police are occupying the combat zone of Adraskan district, about 85 kilometers south of Herat, ministry spokesman Mohammad Zaher Azimi said. He said Amanullah’s forces were no longer in control of Shindand district, 120 kilometers south or Herat, where fighting first broke out. However, a spokesman for the Pushtun forces, Abdul Karim Afghan, denied the report.
The weekend clashes highlight Afghanistan’s fragile security situation as it prepares for its historic presidential elections on Oct. 9. Troops from the new US-trained Afghan National Army as well as forces of the US-led military coalition placed themselves between the forces of Amanullah and Ismail Khan, Afghan told AFP earlier.
Meanwhile, three suspected Taleban fighters including “a senior commander” were killed along with a government soldier in a raid by Afghan military forces, a provincial official said. Acting on a tip-off, soldiers raided a compound used by suspected militants in Nawa, a troubled district in southeastern Ghazni province, governor Asadullah Khalid told AFP.
Seven militants defending the compound were captured during almost two hours of gunfire Wednesday afternoon, he said. “We had reports that a group of Taleban were gathered in a compound in Nawa district — we raided the compound, three Taleban and one soldier were killed,” Khalid said. “Mulla Wazir, a senior Taleban commander, was among the dead,” he added.
The governor said the attack was carried out solely by Afghan forces but that US-led coalition aircraft conducted “maneuver operations” without dropping any ordnance. Nawa, some 220 kilometers south of Kabul has witnessed bloody attacks by Taleban militants in the past.
In late July, two Afghan electoral workers registering people for the country’s presidential elections were killed and four others injured in an attack in Ghazni which authorities blamed on Taleban remnants.
Elsewhere, US-led forces supported by Afghan troops on Wednesday captured 11 militants after fighting them for several hours in southeastern Khost province which borders Pakistan. “Afghan and coalition soldiers assisted by US Special Forces captured 11 insurgents,” the US military said.
Two of the captured men were injured during the gunbattles which lasted more than four hours, the statement said.
Insurgents — a combination of ousted Taleban guerrillas, followers of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Al-Qaeda activists — have carried out attacks on US-led and pro-government troops since the hard-line Islamic regime fell in 2001.
On the political front, analysts yesterday said that individual agendas will likely hobble a united opposition against Afghan President Hamid Karzai in October’s presidential elections. In their first public bid to form a coalition against Karzai, who remains the election favorite, a group of rival candidates said Wednesday they would boycott the vote unless the president stepped down.
But analysts pointed out that in recent days most of Karzai’s main rivals had been quietly meeting alone with the president, and dismissed the boycott as a ploy to strengthen their own negotiations for positions in the post-election administration.
“All these people are meeting with Karzai at the same time, so they can say ‘If you give me what I want then I will back you’,” said a foreign analyst who asked not to be identified. A close aide to Karzai’s chief rival Yunus Qanuni, part of the powerful bloc of Tajik anti-Taleban commanders from the Panjsher Valley, said the former education minister had been promised a vice presidential post in return for backing Karzai, but had so far resisted the offer.
“They have all individually been involved in negotiations with Karzai. A collective agenda is almost impossible because most of the candidates have individual objectives which are mutually exclusive,” said Vikram Parekh, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
“At the moment it is hard to see (the boycott) actually being acted upon, and therefore it looks more like a negotiating point. There have been talks for quite a long time now to try and come up with a common opposition candidate but they have all come undone, mainly because most of the key actors involved are interested in contesting the elections to legitimize themselves,” Parekh told AFP.
Following a meeting of at least 10 of Karzai’s rivals Wednesday, candidate Abdul Sattar Sirat said all 17 would boycott the election if Karzai did not resign within a week. Sirat accused Karzai of misusing his power to influence the United Nations-backed electoral commission. But four other candidates — Masooda Jalal, the only female contestant, Homayoon Shah Asifi, Abdul Hadi Khalilzai, and Ghulam Farooq Nijrabi — later told AFP they didn’t back the boycott call, which came as they tried to establish how alliances might be made and whether some would step down in favor of others.
