KABUL, 18 May 2006 — Three girls’ schools have been attacked in Afghanistan in the past two days, officials said yesterday, in the latest such incidents blamed on Taleban insurgents. A girls’ school was torched close to midnight Tuesday in northern Badakhshan province, deputy provincial governor Mohammad Isa Atahi told AFP. Atahi did not blame the attack on any particular group. Similar violence in the past has been blamed on the Islamist Taleban, which banned girls from attending school when it was in government from 1996 to 2001.
Late Monday, suspected Taleban rebels tied up two watchmen at a girls’ school in northern Balkh province and set the building ablaze, a district police chief said. “Classrooms and the dean’s office were set on fire. This is the work of Taleban,” said Chimtal district police chief Mohammad Hashim Ahmadzai.
Also on Monday a girls’ school came under rocket attack in central Wardak province which adjoins the capital, said provincial spokesman Abdul Hafiz Salam.
Meanwhile, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a vehicle of a UN mine-clearing agency yesterday, killing himself and wounding the agency driver, police said.
The attack, the latest in a string of suicide and roadside bomb blasts blamed on the Taleban, occurred on the road between the main southern town of Kandahar and its airport. “The suicide attacker killed himself but thank God, no one else got killed,” provincial police chief Abdul Malik told Reuters. The driver was slightly wounded, he said. A Taleban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, claimed responsibility.
