KABUL, March 14: The house of a United Nations team working to register voters for Afghanistan's upcoming elections was attacked by suspected Taliban on Sunday as the democratic process rolled forward with the naming of five political parties to contest the polls.
Afghanistan, which is emerging from more than two decades of war, is due to hold elections in June but these have been threatened by insecurity and logistical problems.
Remnants of the ousted Taliban regime have threatened to disrupt the elections and warned people against voting. Taliban have also warned they would attack Afghans working with foreigners and have increasingly targeted non-governmental organizations.
The UN team's house was attacked early Sunday in southeastern province of Paktia but there were no casualties, a UN spokesman said. "We attacked a UN team on Sunday in Chamkani district," a man claiming to be a Taliban spokesman told AFP.
"We don't know if there were any casualties, but several vehicles were destroyed," the man who calls himself Abdul Samad told AFP via telephone from southeastern Afghanistan.
United Nations spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva confirmed the incident and said that no one had been hurt."A UN team of several expatriates in charge of organising voter registration spent the night in the residence of the district chief," he said.
"At about 2.00am, they were attacked with rocket propelled grenades." Voter registration has been going at a slow pace since December and so far some 1,430,602 of the estimated 10.5 million eligible Afghans have registered to vote.
Of these some 397,478, or 28 per cent, are women, indicating a steady increase in the number of females participating in conservative Afghanistan, de Almeida e Silva said at a press conference earlier on Sunday.
PARTIES REGISTERED: Five political parties have also registered with the Ministry of Justice to contest the elections, he said.
Joint Electoral Management Body Commissioner Ghotai Khawry said a credible representative from each party was entitled to supervise voter registration but would not be allowed to interfere in the process. Afghan parties are banned from having a military branch, previously considered mandatory for Mujahideen (anti-Soviet) political groupings. -AFP
