KANDAHAR: A breeze blows down the dark deserted streets of this southern Afghan city as Mohammad Hussin closes his bakery for the night.
Kandahar’s streets are normally bustling with people at eight o’clock in the evening but recently they have been replaced with fear.
“It’s late. It will turn into a ghost town in an hour or so,” says Hussin, preparing to leave behind another day overshadowed by anxiety after at least five Iraq-style suicide bombings in the province in the past month.
Most of the attacks have been pinned on militants from the Taliban movement which rose to power in Kandahar province in the early 1990s before sweeping northwards to claim most of the war-weary country by 1996. They were eventually toppled in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.
The deadliest attack struck the town of Spin Boldak on January 16, when a man on a motorbike blew himself up in a crowd leaving a wrestling match put on for the Eid. Around 25 people were killed.
The same day an attack in Kandahar city killed three soldiers and a civilian.
Just one day earlier a suicide car-bomb — also a copycat of Iraqi attacks — killed a senior Canadian diplomat visiting Kandahar and two Afghan bystanders.
“That week was the bloodiest,” Hussin says.
The city has been relatively calm since then but the fear has not gone away. In fact it is increasing, fuelled by this week’s arrest of an Iraqi whom authorities said was a ‘terrorist’ on his way to Kandahar.
“You never know when and how they will attack,” says Khudaidad, another resident. He acknowledges that most of the targets are military, but adds, “They don’t warn you to get out of the way. I’m scared. I’m scared of everything and everyone, especially people on motorbikes,” says Khudaidan, who like many Afghans uses only one name.
Motorcycles have been used in several of about 25 suicide attacks that have struck the country in the past four months, most of them in Kandahar and the capital Kabul, where Nato-led peacekeepers have been the main target.
They have also been used to carry out a series of assassinations of pro-government figures. In one incident this month, two men on a motorcycle in Kandahar shot dead former Taliban leader Mullah Khaksar who had allied himself with the new US-backed administration.
“There is nowhere to hide,” says money changer Haji Sardar Mohammad in his shop a few kilometres from the blast that killed Canadian envoy Glyn Berry. “If there is an explosion, you just get caught and killed,” he says.
But provincial governor Assadullah Khalid insists recent arrests have broken the back of the militants.
Senior Taliban operatives were also detained during a ‘massive’ manhunt.
A Taliban purported spokesman however called media to say the detained men were not Taliban.
Kandahar military commander Rahmatullah Raufi also says tighter security, with new checkpoints and stepped-up patrols, have made the city safer.
He cites a man captured with a minibus-laden with explosives late on Monday while trying to drive into the city, as an example of better security.
“We work day and night to secure Kandahar. It has worked so far,” Raufi told AFP.
Afghan security forces are being assisted in their fight by a US-led force which helped to topple the Taliban regime after it failed to hand over Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden for the September 11 attacks on US cities.
But residents say the heavily armed troops are not as visible as they were in the past.
“They are less often seen patrolling after the recent attacks. They prefer to say indoors,” says one Afghan military official. “Perhaps they’re scared too.”
The roughly 20,000-strong coalition force, most of it American, has been in Afghanistan since ousting the Taliban and are hunting their remnants in the south and east of the country, destitute areas where the militants find some local support.
“The problems, including the Taliban, that we have, have their roots in poverty,” said Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission regional chief Abdul Qader Noorzai.
“No power can eliminate these elements (Taliban), but the people themselves,” he told AFP. “The people will help if you help them. The people want reconstruction.”—AFP
