Morocco RPCV James Rupert writes: A bombing in a Kandahar mosque killed at least 20 people Wednesday, including a top Afghan police official, in the latest and deadliest of a wave of attacks that has underscored Afghanistan's volatility despite U.S. efforts to stabilize the country.
20 dead in suicide bomb at mosque
BY JAMES RUPERT
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
June 1, 2005, 6:53 PM EDT
Caption: An Afghan police officer, right, stands inside the mosque after a bomb blast in Kandahar, Afghanistan in this June 1, 2005 file photo killed 20 people and wounded dozens of others during the funeral of a cleric who spoke out against the Taliban, officials said. A deadly suicide bombing at a mosque and an attempt to down a U.S. (AP Photo) June 1, 2005
KABUL, Afghanistan -- A bombing in a Kandahar mosque killed at least 20 people Wednesday, including a top Afghan police official, in the latest and deadliest of a wave of attacks that has underscored Afghanistan's volatility despite U.S. efforts to stabilize the country.
The bomb killed mourners at funeral prayers for the city's senior cleric, Maulvi Abdullah Fayaz, who was killed by gunmen on Sunday in an attack claimed by the militant Taliban movement. A Taliban spokesman disavowed Wednesday's bombing, which was seen by Afghans as especially reprehensible for targeting a mosque.
A presumed Muslim militant disguised in a police uniform joined the crowd of mourners and, after the prayers, walked up to Gen. Akram Khakreezwal, police chief of the capital, Kabul. "That was when he detonated his bomb," said Muhammad Afzal, 35, a witness. "It was a terribly big explosion" that also killed the chief's bodyguards, Afzal told the Agence France-Press news service.
The blast shattered the courtyard. "I was knocked unconscious," a survivor, Nanai Agha, told The Associated Press. "When I woke up ... people were running around. Some were lying on the ground, crying. Dead bodies were everywhere." Kandahar officials said the bomber was an Arab, but their evidence and any details about him remained uncertain.
With the killing of Fayaz, the bombing appeared to represent a new escalation in Afghanistan's wave of violence this spring, both in its targeting of a mosque and in the number of casualties. Government and hospital officials told reporters anywhere from 40 to 70 people were injured Wednesday.
The bloody spring has seen several kinds of violence, either by militants out to disrupt U.S.-led efforts to stabilize this country under a pro-Western government or by criminals operating freely in a land where laws are still more theoretical than enforced.
Since March, guerrillas of the Taliban and allied groups increasingly have fought U.S. and Afghan government forces along the mountainous border region with Pakistan. Militant groups reportedly helped spark last month's political violence in at least five cities that killed 15 people and brought the first public demands here for American forces to leave Afghanistan. And attacks on foreign relief workers have increased, including the kidnapping May 16 of Clementina Cantoni, an Italian working with CARE International, reportedly by a criminal gang based in Kabul.
This week's violence in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city, was notable in targeting Fayaz. He was the head of Kandahar's Council of Islamic Clerics and a key religious leader in the government campaign to undermine public sympathy for the Taliban in a region that was their stronghold.
Two years ago, Fayaz led a group of Afghan religious scholars in issuing a fatwa, a learned religious opinion, opposing declarations by militant Afghan and Pakistani mullahs of a jihad, or holy war, against the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. He declared that a jihad in Afghanistan should be fought instead against ignorance.
In 2003, Fayaz survived a bomb attack at the mosque that was hit Wednesday, but he continued to preach in favor of President Hamid Karzai's government and to declare the Taliban un-Islamic. Last month, he hosted a conference of prominent Afghan mullahs that stripped Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar of his symbolic title as "commander of the faithful" among Afghanistan's Muslims.
Abdul Latif Hakimi, a Taliban spokesman, said after Fayaz's assassination that the cleric "was preaching against the Taliban under the name of Islam and deserved to die," AFP reported. Wednesday, Hakimi told news agencies by phone that the Taliban did not bomb the mosque.
