What a victory!
“We did this because we warned people not to get involved in the election process”, Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said
…
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A bomb killed two women working for the U.N.-Afghan electoral body and wounded nine female poll workers and two children on Saturday, in one of the worst attacks on preparations for Afghanistan’s elections.
The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, which was a further setback for President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to bring peace to a country U.S. President George W. Bush has described as a role model for Iraq.
The blast destroyed a bus in the eastern city of Jalalabad which was taking the Afghan women to register voters for the polls scheduled for September, which the Taliban and allied Islamic militants have vowed to disrupt.
“We did this because we warned people not to get involved in the election process,” Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said after contacting Reuters by telephone. “This only strengthens the foundations of the American-backed government.”
He said the guerrillas had also killed two U.S. Marines in an ambush in the eastern province of Kunar on Thursday night, but had released a Turk kidnapped in March while working on a reconstruction project, partly because he was a Muslim.
U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said the Jalalabad attack was probably aimed at discouraging women from voting.
He said two women were killed while three were in critical condition, along with a child who was accompanying his mother. He said nine women suffered lighter injuries.
Earlier, he said a child was also killed in the blast.
Jalalabad police chief Mohammad Younis Noorzai said the bomb was planted inside the minibus. “It was a locally hired van and we have arrested the driver, who was also wounded,” he said.
The U.N. spokesman said the number of women registering in the eastern region had been rising fast despite traditional restrictions on women’s rights.
“They will not reach their goal,” he said of the attackers.
U.N. Special Representative Jean Arnault, who this week urged NATO to urgently step up its peacekeeping presence in Afghanistan, said he was “profoundly outraged.”
The attack was just the latest on the voter registration process and an upsurge in militant violence in the run-up to the polls has raised doubts as to whether they can be held on time.
About 4.5 million of nearly 10 million eligible voters have registered, but the process has been slowed in the south and east by militant violence. Female registration has lagged, partly due to problems recruiting female workers.
The attack came just after Karzai appealed to NATO on Friday to honor its pledge to send more troops to protect the presidential and parliamentary polls.
At a summit in Istanbul next week, NATO is to announce that its 6,400-strong peacekeeping force will take command of four or five military-civilian reconstruction teams in northern Afghanistan and deploy about 1,200 troops for the polls.
But this will fall short of at least 5,000 extra troops the government and the United Nations say are needed, and the deployments will be to relatively secure areas, not to the south and east where militants are most active.
On Friday, Human Rights Watch said NATO “foot-dragging” had contributed to worsening security, adding that blame for a failure of the polls would rest on Washington and NATO.
Analysts say Bush, Karzai’s main supporter, wants a September poll so that he has a foreign policy success to balance against Iraq before his own re-election bid in November.
Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said the attack should be a “strong message” to NATO.
“If the international community wants a peaceful transition in Afghanistan, there definitely needs to be an expansion of NATO into more insecure places,” he said.
Until Saturday, at least 33 foreign and Afghan aid workers had been killed in 18 months, severely disrupting aid and reconstruction work, as well as hampering election preparations.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/06/26/afghan.blast.reut/index.html