KABUL, May 4: A rocket slammed into an uninhabited area near a US special forces base in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, travellers arriving in Kabul from the area said.
They said the rocket landed northeast of the town of Ghazni, where a number of US troops have been based for several months after the Taliban were ousted from power.
“We woke up after a loud explosion shook most areas near the town around 2am. When daylight came we saw a rocket had struck near the town. There were no casualties or damage,” one of the travellers, Ghulam Abbas, said.
Other travellers from the area arriving in Kabul by buses backed up the account.
There was no comment available from US and Afghan defence ministry officials.
Saturday’s attack was the third in less than a month on Ghazni, a dusty and historic town on the highway linking Kabul with Kandahar, the former stronghold of the Taliban.
At least three missiles hit the town itself in each of the other attacks.
Security officials have blamed the attacks on either the Taliban and remnants of the Al Qaeda network, or on infighting between local commanders opposed to the rule of the town’s police chief, Basir Shahid Khel.
Khel, a Pakhtoon from Ghazni, was appointed by Hamid Karzai, the country’s interim president.
Khel’s rivals are said to be ethnic Tajiks, the same ethnic group as the Northern Alliance, which controls key posts including the defence ministry in the interim government.
The rocket attacks on Ghazni come as Afghanistan gears up for next month’s Loyo Jirga, or grand tribal council, which will decide on an administration to rule the country for the next 18 months.
There have been several other outbreaks of warlord-type fighting in the country in recent weeks.
CANADIANS JOIN: Canadian troops joined the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters on Saturday launching an airborne assault in eastern Afghanistan while British Royal Marines scoured rugged mountains in the southeast.
The deployment of several hundred Canadian soldiers by helicopter to an undisclosed location was separate from the British-led “Operation Snipe”, but part of a broad US-led mission to rid Afghanistan’s eastern mountains near the Pakistan border of rebels.—Reuters
