KABUL: Even though he knew his mission would cost him his own life, the man in the baggy white tunic appeared calm and determined, witnesses said.

Suddenly he shouted “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)” and ran towards a crowd of police and civilians at a security checkpoint at the interior ministry in Kabul.

“I heard cops shouting, ‘Shoot him, he’s a suicide bomber,’” recalls a young shopkeeper, Mohammad Akbar, who runs a photography shop near the ministry.

“Then there was a big bang. I lay down and didn’t understand what was happening.

“When I stood up, I saw many dead and injured around me,” he said.

All that was left of the attacker — described as an ordinary-looking man with a trimmed beard and wearing the loose, traditional Afghan dress known as “shalwar kameez” — was two legs and a mass of bloody flesh.

He took with him 13 people, according to police, and wounded nearly 50.

One of the dead was a policeman who had been about to open fire. “Jahanzib was just about to shoot him,” said a colleague named Abdul Wassay.

The attack on Saturday was the fifth in the heavily guarded capital in September. Together the blasts have killed nearly 40 people — all of them Afghans except two US troops and a British soldier.

Afghanistan has seen a dramatic rise in suicide bombings — unheard of here before 2001 and rare before 2005.

There have been 91 such attacks this year, according to the United Nations, in which around 170 civilians and dozens of foreign and Afghan troops have died.

In the southern province of Kandahar alone there has been a fourfold increase this year to more than 40 attacks to August, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has said. The first recorded suicide attack in Afghanistan was on Sept 9, 2001, when two Arab militants disguised as TV journalists assassinated legendary anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud.

The killers were from Al Qaeda, which days later carried out the September 11 suicide attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people and led US forces to invade Afghanistan in search of Al Qaeda leaders sheltered by the Taliban.

In the five years since they were forced from the capital and back to their heartland in the south or across the border to Pakistan, the Taliban have been able to regroup to wage an increasingly deadly insurgency.

They have launched mass attacks on military patrols and bases, mostly in the south of the country where they have confronted the might of major world powers Britain and the United States.

It was not unexpected that their defeats on the battlefield would lead to a rise in suicide attacks, military officials have said.

“Actually these suicide bombs are a sign of huge weakness” with the rebels being beaten conventionally, ISAF commander Lieutenant General David Richards said last month.

Richards described the attacks as “huge own goals for the Taliban because they are often killing their own people, the very people they are talking about protecting, and people are getting fed up with it.”

People are also increasingly terrified. Many avoid certain roads in the capital and the southern city of Kandahar which see most of the suicide blasts against foreign troops.

Foreign and Afghan military officials say that the majority of the attackers are not Afghans, pointing to the influence of Al Qaeda.

“The suicide attackers are mainly outsiders — 50 per cent of them belong to Punjab province of Pakistan, 40 per cent of them belong to Arab countries and 10 per cent of them are Afghan citizens,” said an Afghan police officer who studies suicide bombings.

“The graph of suicide attacks has increased significantly in Afghanistan, inspired from attacks of Iraq,” he told AFP, requesting anonymity for his own security.

The attackers — usually young men — are inspired by religious fervour and feel privileged to be chosen for the task, he said.

“With all of them the masterminds of attacks work on religious enthusiasm.”

According to his research, attackers are sometimes chosen for a particular mission in a kind of lucky draw. “If man wins, his friends congratulate him.”

The pressure on a suicide attacker accounts for some of the premature blasts in which the bombers explode before reaching their targets, he said.

“The suicide attacker is also a human being and he can also come under some pressure and ... only know that the (detonator) is the entry ticket to the heaven,” he said.

The attackers have increasingly been choosing softer targets because of the difficulties striking heavily secured military forces who are always adapting to the increased threat, Western military official say.

Suicide blasts have a “great return” in that they cost little but make a worldwide statement, one military officer said.

“It certainly causes havoc and it makes us deal with it... (but) that will not win the overall insurgency,” he said.—-AFP