KHOST, Afghanistan, 23 October 2005 — As many as nine policemen and four suspected Taleban fighters were killed Friday after a two-hour armed clash in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand, officials said yesterday. The clash took place in Naw-Zad district of Helmand province after police got information about the whereabouts of the suspected Taleban fighters from two Taleban militants who had been arrested Thursday, according to Mohauddin Khan, a senior local official.
“All the four Taleban and nine Afghan police, including the police officer were killed on the spot,” Khan said, adding that the attack was launched by Afghan police. “Two hundred police have been sent to the area to support the government troops in the fight against the enemies,” Khan added.
A bomb also ripped through a military vehicle in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, killing an Afghan journalist and injuring three military personnel, an intelligence official said. The journalist had been standing on a road in eastern Khost province when the remotely detonated bomb exploded near the military vehicle nearby, he said.
The blast wounded three other people, including the son of a commander of a militia unit helping security forces track down Taleban militants, Khost’s intelligence director Sadeq Tarakhil told AFP.
“One journalist who was standing nearby was killed, three others were injured — (commander Khyal Baz) Sherzai’s son was among them,” he said.
The journalist, named only Maiwand, worked for a local radio station called Da Solah Pigham (The Message of Peace), station director Zahid Shah Angar said. The 22-year-old ran a cultural program and had not been covering a story when he was killed.
Authorities blamed the attack on the “enemies of Afghanistan’s stability,” a term often used to refer to militants who are loyal to the Taleban regime ousted in 2001 and are trying to topple the new government. Sherzai confirmed the bombing in Do Saraka district, just outside the provincial capital Khost, but did not say who might have been behind it. “They attacked my car — perhaps I was the target,” he said. He was not in the vehicle at the time.
Sherzai commands one of several US-funded militia units that are helping Afghan security forces and a nearly 20,000-strong US-led coalition force hunt down Taleban insurgents and their allies in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the United States has gone to great lengths to win over Afghans, sending billions in aid and using its troops for humanitarian work. But TV footage purportedly showing US soldiers burning the bodies of Taleban rebels threatens to fray that good will. With Islamic clerics warning of a violent anti-American backlash, the alleged desecration of dead Muslims has American commanders scrambling to contain a public relations calamity that comes as they struggle to bolster support for their war against a stubborn insurgency.
President Hamid Karzai, who recently challenged the need for US airstrikes and house-to-house searches in fighting Taleban rebels, also seemed worried about reaction to the desecration allegation. While he condemned the apparent act, Karzai sought to calm passions Friday, saying that “soldiers make mistakes” in war. Cremating bodies, even those of animals, is banned in Islam.
A student, Jamshid Agha, speaking after Friday prayers, said that when he heard the news, he was “so angry with America, I felt like taking a weapon and fighting.” Though Afghan media have reported on the alleged desecration, the video hasn’t been broadcast here and by late Friday there had been no protest rallies. The last anti-American protests in Afghanistan that turned violent were in May over a report by Newsweek — later retracted — that US soldiers at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility abused Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an.
