Insurgents on Monday staged deadly coordinated strikes in the western city of Herat, where an explosion killed at least four people in a bustling downtown area and a car bomb detonated at the gates of a NATO base, injuring some Italian soldiers inside, Afghan and coalition officials said.
The attacks came against a backdrop of steadily rising violence across Afghanistan in the month since the Taliban movement declared the start of its spring offensive. Many of the insurgent strikes have targeted heavily guarded Afghan government and security installations.Herat, a normally tranquil city near Afghanistan’s border with Iran, has been designated as one of the first parts of the country where Western troops are to hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces. But it is feared that the Taliban and other insurgent groups will specifically target these seven areas in advance of the security transition, seeking to sap the morale of local people, together with that of the Afghan police and soldiers who are supposed to protect them.
The late-morning car bombing outside the Italian-run base on Herat’s outskirts was accompanied by a burst of gunfire, Afghan officials and witnesses said, but it was not known whether the fire came from attackers or the base’s defenders. Italian media reports quoted the country’s Defense Ministry as saying five Italian soldiers were hurt, one of them seriously.
Italy has about 3,800 soldiers in Afghanistan, and — as is the case in many troop-contributing NATO nations — the war is an unpopular one, increasingly cropping up in domestic political debate.
Around the same time the Italian base was hit, a bomb apparently concealed in a motorbike went off at a busy intersection, said Noor Khan Nekzad, a provincial police spokesman. In addition to the four dead, he said, nearly three dozen other people were hurt.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Meanwhile, the NATO force apologized Monday for the deaths of civilians in a weekend U.S. airstrike in Helmand province, in the south of Afghanistan, but its tally of noncombatants who were killed — nine — was lower than the count provided by Afghan officials. President Hamid Karzai’s office said 14 women and children died when a residential compound was hit.
Karzai strongly condemned the attack and appealed to the NATO force to exercise more care not to injure and kill civilians. Attacks by insurgents are responsible for about three-quarters of the noncombatant deaths, but those caused by foreign forces tend to cause far more public anger because people believe they should be held to a different standard than the Taliban and other militant groups.
Also Monday, the Western military said an attacker in an Afghan army uniform fired on coalition troops in southern Afghanistan, killing at least one member of the NATO force, whose nationality was not disclosed.
Turncoat attacks by Afghan police and soldiers against their Western mentors have become increasingly common in recent months. Taliban leaders have boasted of their ability to infiltrate the Afghan security forces, although some such attacks have apparently been carried out with the use of stolen uniforms.
