NorthIowaToday.com

Founded in 2010

News & Entertainment for Mason City, Clear Lake & the Entire North Iowa Region

Coordinated attacks across Afghanistan kill at least 39

By Laura King and Hashmat Baktash, Los Angeles Times –

KABUL, Afghanistan — In one of the year’s deadliest days for Afghan civilians, at least 39 people were killed and more than 100 hurt Tuesday in attacks that spanned the country from north to south — including the brutal tactic of a suicide bombing staged at a hospital where victims of an initial blast were being treated.

The more lethal of the two strikes, in Nimroz province, involved nearly a dozen would-be bombers, authorities said, although all but three were arrested or killed before or during the attack. Nonetheless, it showed the insurgents’ willingness to sacrifice large numbers of fighters in a single operation, and also their continuing wherewithal to stage complex and coordinated attacks.

The blasts also reinforced a pervasive sense of insecurity felt by many ordinary Afghans. Civilian war casualties fell by 15 percent in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2011, the United Nations reported earlier this month, but the advent of the warm-weather “fighting season” has seen a spike in violence across Afghanistan.

Most of those killed in a triple suicide bombing in Nimroz province, in the southwest, and a remote-controlled blast in Kunduz province in the north, were people out shopping for their nightly iftar, the meal that breaks the dawn-to-dusk fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and for the holiday feast beginning this weekend that marks Ramadan’s end.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. The Taliban at times refrain from acknowledging having carried out suicide bombings and other strikes that kill large numbers of civilians.

Insurgents often stage attacks involving near-simultaneous bombings, and have sometimes targeted medical facilities. But the notion of deliberately hitting a hospital to which injured people were being brought was shocking to most Afghans, even by this war’s grim standard. The bombings were widely condemned, with Gen. John Allen, the American commander of the Western military in Afghanistan, calling them “intentional mass murder.”

The spasm of bloodshed comes at a time when the NATO force is preparing to wind down its combat role and hand over responsibility for securing the country to the Afghan police and army by the end of 2014, raising troubling new questions as to whether the insurgency can be contained when international troops depart.

The first of the two attacks took place in the town of Zaranj, the Nimroz provincial capital. There, explosions tore through a bustling bazaar and two other nearby sites, including the entrance to the city’s main hospital. The second early-evening strike took place in the Dasht-e-Archi district of Kunduz province, where a bomb attached to a motorcycle in a shopping area killed at least 10 civilians and injured more than two dozen others, said Enaytullah Khaleeq, a provincial spokesman.

The carnage in Nimroz could have been even worse, given that police arrested several would-be bombers in raids prior to the attack and killed or detained several more during it, said Abdul Majid Latifi, the provincial deputy police chief. Latifi said the 29 victims were mainly civilians, but included four police officers as well.

In both Nimroz and Kunduz provinces, the targets were civilian areas, distant from any military installation. The NATO force is not even deployed in Nimroz, which borders Iran as well as volatile Helmand province. Earlier this week, a policeman in the province turned his weapon on fellow officers, killing 10 of them.

Tuesday also brought a continuation of an ominous and increasingly commonplace occurrence: the assassination of a pair of district officials, including a district chief. The killings took place in the Badakhshan province, in the country’s north, where the officials and two of their bodyguards were killed in an insurgent ambush as they were traveling home for this weekend’s Eid al-Fitr holiday.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Even more news:

Watercooler
Copyright 2024 – Internet Marketing Pros. of Iowa, Inc.
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x