Afghanistan bomb blasts kill two people: police

by Nasrat Shoaib Nasrat Shoaib – Mon Apr 26, 2010, 7:38 am ET

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) –

Twin bomb blasts killed two people on Monday in an attack targeting police in the southern city of Kandahar, which is increasingly the focus of the Taliban's fight against Kabul.

The home-made devices, of the type widely used by Taliban fighters, were set off within a minute of each other as a police convoy passed through the southern capital, deputy provincial police chief Fazil Ahmad Sherzad said.

Sherzad said he believed he was the target of the attack, although he was not in the convoy at the time. Police said two civilians were killed.

"I was the target. I take this road at this time every day going to work and back home," he told AFP.

A third blast took place about two hours later but no one was injured, he said.

Kandahar, seen as the key battleground in US-led efforts to reverse an insurgency that has lasted nearly nine years, has recently been the scene of escalating Taliban violence including similar bombings, assassinations and suicide attacks.

US and NATO troops are increasingly focusing operations around Kandahar province and its capital city of the same name.

Taliban cells are said to have large parts of the city of one million people under their control.

The United States is leading a major troop surge, boosting the current 126,000 foreign forces in the country to 150,000 by August, with thousands of the reinforcements headed towards Kandahar.

Military planners say operations against the Taliban in the province have already begun and will escalate in the coming months as the extra troops are deployed under escalated counter-insurgency tactics.

While the Taliban rely on crude bombs, often buried or detonated by remote control, the use of targeted suicide bomb attacks and assassinations is also rising as the US-led international forces turn their focus on Kandahar.

The city's deputy mayor, Azizullah Yarmal, was shot dead last week at point blank range while praying at his local mosque, Zalami Ayobi, spokesman for the Kandahar governor, said.

A gunman emptied the magazine of an automatic rifle into Yarmal's head before escaping.

Yarmal's death -- and the bold nature of his assassination -- marked an escalation in Taliban tactics in Kandahar, which was the capital of their brutal 1996-2001 regime and which they regard as their spiritual home.

In recent months, Taliban fighters have targeted officials in the provincial government and those seen as close to the Western-backed Kabul administration, with varying degrees of success.

The day before Yarmal's shooting, three nephews of a pro-government official who ran President Hamid Karzai's campaign during last year's fraud-tainted elections died as the donkey cart they were playing on exploded.

The official, Fazluddin Agha, said he believed he was the target.

As the Taliban have been digging in over the southern provinces, a rise in their presence in the north has also been evident in the past year as the supply route from Central Asia to NATO bases has drawn the opposition.

NATO said a senior Taliban commander of Kunduz province and two senior advisers had been "killed in a precision air strike early Monday morning.