The Taliban gunned down the deputy mayor of Kandahar, perhaps the city’s most effective and admired public official, late on Monday, demonstrating their ability to kill almost anyone in a region where security continues to worsen ahead of a massive summer offensive.And in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, a NATO convoy shot to death four unarmed civilians in a vehicle, including a police officer and 12-year-old student, according to local Afghan officials. But without offering proof, NATO described the dead as two insurgents and their “associates” — a disagreement that could prompt another dispute with the Afghan government over civilian casualties.Kandahar was capital city of the Taliban before the United States-led invasion in 2001, and attempts to secure the surrounding province from Taliban guerrillas and institute new governance programs this summer could be crucial to the fate of the 8-and-a-half-year occupation. With only weeks to go before the offensive, the Taliban have been stepping up violence mbt outlet
** in the city with a series of assassinations and attacks on American and Western contractors, political officials and religious leaders.Even so, residents were stunned by what happened Monday night: Deputy Mayor Azizullah Yarmal walked into a mosque in central Kandahar, turned toward Mecca and began to pray to Allah. As he reached the point where he and the others in the mosque knelt in unison and then bent forward to touch their foreheads to the ground, gunmen made their move, shooting him with a pistol, said Zalmy Ayoubi, a government spokesman.The gunmen escaped, and the Taliban quickly claimed responsibility.“We have killed him because he was working for this puppet government,” Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, one of the Taliban’s regular spokesmen, said in a telephone interview. “We will target all those who are working for government.”The top NATO civilian official in Afghanistan, the former British Ambassador Mark Sedwill, called the shooting “an appalling act.”“This was a man who was simply seeking to serve his people,” he said.Shaken locals said he was likely killed because he was seen as honest and effective — unlike so many other Kandahar leaders.“He was one of the officials who was dedicated to his job and he was actually committed to his work,” said Mr. Ayoubi, who described him as an honest problem-solver. “We really lost a good person.”The assassination was not the only attack of note in Kandahar on Monday. Hours before, militants trussed a bomb to a donkey and led it to the checkpoint in front of the home of one of President Hamid Karzai’s most important political allies in Kandahar, the former governor of Spin Boldak district.The former governor, Haji Fazluddin Agha, who had also served as Mr. Karzai’s top campaign official in Kandahar 传奇私服
** Province, was unhurt when the militants detonated the bomb using a remote-control device. But the blast killed three of his grandchildren, who were 15, 13 and 12. Two bystanders and two policemen were also wounded.In Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, a dispute emerged almost immediately over the deaths of the four men shot by the NATO convoy early Monday evening.Local Afghan officials, including the governor of Gurbuz district, said the four were slain at 6 p.m. as they drove home in a white Toyota. One official identified the men as Maiwand, a police officer; Faizullah, a 12-year-old student; and two shopkeepers at the Khost bazaar, Amirullah and Nasratullah.The governor of Khost, Abdul Jabar Naimi, also described the four as a policeman, a student and two shop owners. “I am deeply saddened that these four civilians were killed by NATO forces on the way to their home,” he said. “We are still doing our investigation to see if they were involved in any criminal activities against the government.”An Afghan interpreter who works with NATO forces in the province also described the four victims as civilians.The American-led NATO military command in Kabul confirmed the shooting but offered a vastly different assessment: It said two of the dead men were identified after the fact as “known insurgents.” A NATO spokesman in Kabul said that identification was made using “biometric data” but he could not say how that specifically tied the men to the militancy.In a statement issued in Kabul, NATO said the military convoy was returning to its base after defusing a roadside bomb when the vehicle approached from the opposite direction.The troops “attempted to flag the vehicle down, and flashed its lights,” the statement said, but the “driver of the unidentified vehicle responded by turning off the vehicle’s headlights and accelerating toward the convoy.”NATO troops fired warning shots, the military said, but the vehicle continued to accelerate. designer shoes
** “Several rounds were fired in an attempt to disable the vehicle, and finally shots were fired into the vehicle itself.”The commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, has said that he sympathizes with troops on checkpoints and in convoys who have to make critical decisions in an instant about whether to fire on vehicles perceived to be a threat because they are traveling too fast or too close.But last month, General McChrystal said that in the nearly 10 months since he took command there had not been a single checkpoint or convoy shooting that caused casualties where, later, “it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it.”