KANDAHAR, 18 March 2005 — Suspected Taleban rebels detonated two bombs in Afghanistan yesterday that killed five people and injured 32, hours after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the country, officials said.
A remote-controlled parcel bomb tore through a taxi in Kandahar, the birthplace of the ousted regime, as a two-vehicle World Food Program convoy passed, killing two women, a child and two men, officials and witnesses said.
“There was blood all over the street and many people were blown up to two or three meters in the air during the blast,” a mechanic named Shawali, who was at the scene, told AFP. A second bomb, which apparently targeted a pick-up truck belonging to an international development agency, detonated simultaneously on the outskirts of the city but caused no casualties.
City police chief Khan Mohammed blamed the violence on Taleban militants. “Of course it is Taleban, who else can it be?” he told AFP.
The militia, which continues to launch attacks in the south and southeast, denied involvement, saying it was saddened by the incident and that it only targeted foreign troops.
“We totally deny any involvement in today’s blasts in Kandahar city which took lives of innocent people. We have no enmity with civilians,” Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi told AFP by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.
Frantic residents searched for missing relatives at the city’s Mirwais Hospital, where there were scenes of chaos and shock.
Rice landed in Kabul early yesterday for talks with Afghan leaders. She spoke proudly of the progress Afghanistan had made since US forces helped the Afghan opposition oust the Taleban militia in late 2001. “We have a long-term commitment to this country,” Rice told a joint news conference with President Hamid Karzai.
Rice, on her first visit to Kabul, said the United States would stick by the Afghan government as it sought to bring peace and stability after decades of violence going back to the Soviet invasion in 1979. “We learned the hard way what it meant not to have a long-term commitment,” she said, referring to how Washington abandoned Afghanistan once Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 leaving Al-Qaeda to establish bases there.
Speaking earlier at the US military base in Kabul, Rice spoke of Washington’s mission to spread democracy. She cited Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently Lebanon as examples of how democracy was beginning to take hold in the broader Middle East — an area ranging from North Africa to Central Asia.
“We are going to build a different kind of Middle East, a different kind of broader Middle East that is going to be stable and democratic and where our children will one day not have to be worried about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led those people to fly those planes into those buildings on Sept. 11.”
Afghanistan’s electoral commission has postponed holding the country’s long-delayed parliamentary polls, Karzai and Rice told the news conference. “They proposed September and we respect whatever recommendation this commission makes,” Karzai said. “The delay in the elections is because it was impossible to have it in May as we wanted it,” Karzai said, blaming “technical matters”.
