KABUL, 3 April 2005 — Eleven people were killed and eight wounded in four separate incidents in Afghanistan, marking a surge in an anticipated Taleban offensive against the US-led coalition and Afghan forces, police and the Interior Ministry said yesterday. Suspected Taleban insurgents attacked government district offices in the southeastern province of Helmand yesterday, killing four policemen and injuring three others, officials said.
Dozens of suspected insurgents from the country’s ousted Taleban regime stormed the Disho district office during the attack, provincial intelligence chief Dad Mohammad told AFP. Yesterday’s attack followed three other deadly incidents on Friday, and came in the wake of several rebel strikes during the past two weeks.
A bomb planted on a tractor trolley killed two people and injured five in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif while a roadside bomb blast in southern Kandahar province killed two teenagers. A three-truck convoy was ambushed in the town of Spin Boldak near the Pakistani border on the route taken by drivers to carry fuel to the US forces, Kandahar police chief Mohammad Ayoob Salangi told AFP.
Three truck drivers including two Pakistanis were killed in the attack and the insurgents burned their vehicle, Salangi said. Authorities said they had no immediate clues on who carried out Friday’s attacks but such incidents have previously been linked to Taleban insurgents.
“We don’t know who was behind the attacks,” Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal Mashal said, adding that police were investigating the two blasts. Spin Boldak, five kilometers from the southwestern Pakistani town of Chaman, is considered a stronghold of remnants of the Taleban regime which was ousted from power in late 2001 by US-led forces. After an unusually harsh winter, the coming of Spring has brought a surge in attacks on the US-led coalition and Afghan forces.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, a Taleban raiding party attacked Deshu district headquarters in the southwest province of Helmand, killing three police and wounding four. The large band of fighters rode into Deshu on around ten pickup trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles, according to District Governor Abdul Rahim.
Rahim said there were signs that the Taleban also suffered casualties, though any dead or wounded were taken away. The truckers were ambushed on Friday night near the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak, the main crossing point from Pakistan to the Afghan city of Kandahar.
They had been transporting military jeeps to Kandahar, the main US base in southern Afghanistan. “Taleban attacked the trucks and killed the drivers. Two of them were Afghan and the third one was Pakistani,” said Sayed Fazel Din Agha, district governor of Spin Boldak.
“The number and severity of attacks against Afghan and coalition forces has increased compared to the winter,” US military spokeswoman Lt. Cindy Moore said. Coalition and Afghan forces have seized a number of improvised explosive devices in the past few days, Moore said.
The commander of US forces in the country, Lt. Gen. David Barno, told AFP this week that Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network was making fresh efforts to engineer a comeback by the Taleban and regain a foothold of its own in Afghanistan.
