KABUL/Washington - Taliban insurgents killed nine people in multiple attacks on police targets in Afghanistan Thursday, in their first major assaults since an acrimonious power transition after the announcement of leader Mullah Omar’s death.
In the first attack a suicide truck bomber killed six people early Thursday when he struck a police compound in Pul-i-Alam, the capital of insurgency-racked Logar province just south of Kabul. The force of the explosion damaged government buildings near the site, which was left littered with debris and shards of broken glass.
The bombing highlights growing insecurity amid a faltering peace process with the Taliban as Afghan forces face their first summer fighting season without full NATO support. “A water truck filled with explosives was detonated when it was stopped at the gate of the Quick Reaction Force (police) compound,” said deputy provincial police chief Mohammad Qari Wara.
“It was a powerful explosion... which killed three members of the Quick Reaction Force and three civilians.”
President Ashraf Ghani condemned the “cowardly act” in a statement, adding that the “killing of innocent people is an unforgivable crime that can be justified in no religion”. In two other separate attacks in the southern province of Kandahar, Taliban militants raided a police checkpoint and a police station, sparking brief gun battles that killed three local security officials, including an intelligence officer.
Meanwhile, at least 17 people, including 12 Afghan army soldiers, were killed in a helicopter crash in the volatile southern province of Zabul, although officials said the incident was caused by a technical fault and not insurgent activity. The attacks in Logar and Kandahar mark the first major insurgent assaults since the Taliban confirmed last week the death of their leader Mullah Omar, who led the militant movement for some 20 years.
The Taliban are stepping up their summer offensive despite an increasingly bitter power transition within the militant movement after Mullah Akhtar Mansour was announced as the new leader on Friday. The group claimed responsibility for all three attacks, with spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid alledging that more than 100 security personnel were killed in the Logar bombing.
The insurgents are known to exaggerate the death toll in attacks on Afghan government and military targets, but do not usually claim responsibility for those which result in a large number of civilian deaths.
Yet in a rare admission, Mujahid said “some civilians may have been wounded (in Logar) as a result of broken glass”. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan hit a record high in the first half of 2015, a UN report said Wednesday, as Afghan forces struggle to contain the expanding conflict six months after the NATO combat mission ended.
The report said 1,592 civilians were killed, a six percent fall from last year, but the number of injured jumped four percent to 3,329. Overall, casualties reached their highest level since the UN began issuing its authoritative reports in 2009.
The statistics are a grim indicator of the rising violence as the Taliban insurgency spreads north from its traditional southern and eastern strongholds, with Afghan forces increasingly battling the militants on their own.
Meanwhile, Afghan National Security Forces are losing about 4,000 soldiers per month, but the majority of those come from soldiers abandoning their jobs, not from casualties in battle, the commander of US operations in Afghanistan has said.
General John Campbell said he blames the high attrition rate on a lack of leadership that gives young Afghan soldiers and police little choice but to go home and never return to the Afghan military.
“It’s because you have young soldiers and police who have been fighting in Helmand [Province] for two or three years, they haven’t had a break. They’re maybe not getting the right food they deserve. They might not have an opportunity to train,” Campbell said in a speech at the Brookings Institution. “When you’re fighting all the time, when you need to take a break and you have no other way, you go back home and you don’t come back.”
The US is working with Afghan officials to build military leadership that knows how to take care of its soldiers, something the US military takes for granted, Campbell said.
Despite high attrition, Campbell, who has spent much of his career in Afghanistan during the 14 years of war, said the Afghan troops get “better and better” each time he goes back to the country.
“They have challenges, they have issues,” he said. “But, again, I see them continue to progress and continue to be very, very resilient.”
Many cities and the roadways around them in Afghanistan are as secure as they’ve ever been, Campbell said. While terrorists continue to attack throughout the country, Afghan forces are able to regain any lost land much quicker than even a year ago, he said.
As an example, it could take Afghan soldiers up to a week to regain control of a remote district center captured by terrorists this time last year, he said.
“Today what you see is as soon as one of those district centers, within hours most of the time the Afghan Security Forces are taking it back,” he said. “I think that’s a sign of progress as they move forward.”