No organization has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Foreign Minister Abdullah blamed “terrorists led by Osama [bin Laden]” as the most likely culprits. “They [Al Qaeda] are trying to show their organization is not fully destroyed,” Abdullah told journalists at a press briefing in Kabul tonight. “This was a message to their own audience, their own constituency.”
However, the foreign minister also said Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is another possible suspect. The fundamentalist Hekmatyar, who served four years as Afghanistan’s prime minister before the Taliban took power in 1996, is opposed to the international presence in Afghanistan and renewed his call for jihad against foreign powers in the country two days ago. “This shows, and we believe, that terrorism is still not eradicated from Afghanistan and the region,” said Abdullah. “It proves the war on terrorism is not finished here.”
Karzai was leaving the Kandahar governor’s office, a high-security compound cut off from street traffic, at approximately 6:30 p.m. local time when a uniformed gunman opened fire on his car. At least two bullets penetrated the car, narrowly missing Karzai but wounding Kandahar governor Gul Agha Shirzai. The presidential bodyguards, which include a contingent of U.S. Special Forces, returned fire, killing the gunman. One of Karzai’s Afghan bodyguards was killed and two others were wounded in the gun battle. Karzai had traveled to Kandahar to attend the wedding of his brother Ahmad Wali Karzai.
Only a few hours earlier, twin explosions ripped through a crowded shopping plaza in central Kabul. According to eyewitnesses, a small bomb, possibly strapped to a bicycle, went off at approximately 2:50 p.m., wounding a handful of passersby. Minutes later, as shopkeepers and pedestrians gathered to tend to the wounded, a second bomb, hidden in a Soviet-era Moskovitch car, detonated, showering the crowd with shrapnel and glass.
The powerful blasts shattered the windows of several multistory buildings enclosing the plaza, including the Ministry of Culture and Information. “I heard the first explosion and came to see what happened,” Mohammed Ibrahim, 55, nursing a bandaged hand and blood-stained shalwar kameez robes, told NEWSWEEK. “The next thing I saw was pieces of a car flying through the air.” It’s unclear who may have been the intended target of the bombs, but staff at the Spin Zar hotel, located directly across from the blast site, say Interior Minister Taj Mohammed Wardak had left the premises two hours before.
Members of the International Security Assistance Force, along with heavily armed security agents from the U.S. State Department, soon cordoned off the site. The wounded, who included several children, were taken to local hospitals in private vehicles and ambulances. “This was one of the worst I’ve ever seen,” says Dr. Mohammed, the deputy director of Kabul’s 400-bed military hospital. Nearby, a nurse covered the bloody body of a young man with a white sheet and announced that he had just died of internal bleeding. The final death toll is still unconfirmed amid conflicting accounts from Afghan sources. While initial reports put it at 22, Abullah later told foreign journalists that it was at least 10. Late-breaking wire reports put the toll at 26 dead and 150 injured. Today’s attack on the capital was the bloodiest since the Taliban was ousted from power last November. It came as Afghans prepared for a particularly sensitive anniversary of their own: the Sept. 9 assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud by killers posing as journalists. Many believe that Osama bin Laden arranged the killing of Massoud to weaken internal opposition to the Taliban ahead America’s expected retaliation to the attacks on New York and Washington two days later.
Afghan officials didn’t immediately link today’s two incidents of violence, but, taken together, they underscored the fragile security situation in the country. Kabul has been rocked by a series of mysterious explosions in recent weeks, one of which was outside a compound belonging to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA). In early July, vice president Haji Abdul Qadir was killed in a daring daytime attack and Abdul Rahman, the Minister of Tourism and Aviation, was beaten to death at Kabul airport in February. Neither case has been solved.
