KABUL: Sher Mohammad survived one of the blasts that shook Kabul on Wednesday but the 22-year-old is frightened there will be more if the violence plaguing the south fully engulfs the Afghan capital.
“I was standing right in here,” said Mohammad from his bread shop across the road from the first blast on Wednesday, which struck a bus transporting soldiers at about 7:00 am. “I survived but I’m so scared,” he told AFP.
The bus, hit by explosives hidden in a wooden cart of the type often used by hawkers, veered into a shop and caught fire, and was quickly reduced to a charred and melted husk. Forty army officers were hurt, the defence ministry said.
An hour later a second blast hit a bus full of commerce ministry workers in the northern part of the city. One was killed and four wounded, police said.
There were two similar attacks in the capital on Tuesday which wounded about five people.
The congested city of up to four million people has not seen the level of Taliban attacks — including suicide blasts and roadside bomb attacks — that have rocked the south and east of the country almost daily.
There have been some attacks on Afghan and international security forces in the city as well as a few ineffective rocket strikes.
But this week’s series of apparently coordinated blasts, some in the heart of the city near government ministries and the presidential compound, is unprecedented.
“It’s too scary,” said construction worker Abdul Zubair. “I am not sure of my safety — who knows, one may hit me one day.”
Nineteen-year-old schoolboy Noor Mohammad said his mother was reluctant to allow him to go to school. “She’s scared,” he said, also admitting to being nervous him-self.
An Afghan who had just returned from a refugee camp in Pakistan, where he fled years ago to avoid this country’s three decades of conflict, said the violence was making him think twice about his decision to bring his family home.
“I came from Pakistan thinking the security is good,” Abdul Nazir said angrily. “But look, there have been four blasts in two days... If this is the situation, I’ll take my kids back to Pakistan.”
“I would prefer a refugee camp to Kabul. I don’t want this,” he said.
An elderly shopkeeper blamed the government of US-backed President Hamid Karzai for failing to provide security for his people.
“The president is sitting in his office and doesn’t know what is going on in his capital. Look, the security is deteriorating,” said Khairuddin, sweeping up shards of glass from windows blasted by the army bus blast.
“I was nearly hit,” he said.
The blasts, claimed by the extremist Taliban movement that ruled this country from 1996 until 2001, come a month after Kabul was rocked by huge riots that were sparked by a deadly traffic accident involving a US military vehicle.
The crash and subsequent violence on May 29 left 17 people dead, with rioters rampaging out of control of police for several hours, and buildings and cars torched and offices ransacked.
It was the worst unrest in the city since the Taliban were forced out of government by a US-led coalition and fled the capital under the cover of darkness.
The latest attacks are intended to shake the city and its massive security apparatus out of its complacency while Taliban violence rages in the south, a Western diplomat said.
“They want to stop the people of Kabul thinking that this is a sanctuary,” she told AFP. “They want to try to create a feeling of insecurity and to destabilise the authorities to show that they can hit Kabul.”
The defence ministry said the strikes were the militants’ way of making up for heavy casualties inflicted on them in the south, where the biggest anti-Taliban operation since late 2001 has been under way since mid-May.
“This is the work of the enemies of Afghanistan who sustained heavy losses in the south and by suicide and bomb explosions they want to recompensate,” spokesman general Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.—AFP
