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Bomb kills Afghan governor, 15 others: official

08 October 2010 18:17 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A large bomb blast tore through a mosque in north Afghanistan on Friday, killing the governor of Kunduz province and 15 others as they attended weekly prayers, the local police chief said, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
The rare assassination of a top official is the latest in a string of attacks in the once quite peaceful north, where the insurgency has been strengthening its grip as the war with NATO-led foreign troops enters its tenth year.
It will leave a power vacuum in a strategic province of northeastern Afghanistan, a sometime safe-haven for the Taliban. Kunduz was the last Taliban-controlled city to fall when U.S. troops helped oust the group from power in 2001.
Governor Mohammed Omar was killed in Taloqan, the capital of neighboring Takhar, where he was born and kept a family home.
The blast blew the windows out of the mosque, where piles of blood-spattered shoes had been left in the dust. The imam also died and at least 20 people were wounded.
Omar had narrowly escaped two previous attempts on his life -- a roadside bomb just two months ago that destroyed a police vehicle in his convoy and an ambush last year.
"We do not know whether it was a suicide attack or whether the bomb was already planted in the mosque," Takhar police chief Shah Jahan Noori told Reuters.
Attacks during religious ceremonies are relatively rare in Afghanistan although in July a mosque bombing killed a candidate for parliamentary elections in eastern Khost province.
The attack on Omar was the highest profile killing since the assassination last September of the country’s deputy intelligence chief, Abdullah Laghmani, and the first successful strike on an Afghan provincial governor since a 2008 roadside bombing.
Lower-level murders are common however. The deputy governor of Ghazni province was killed with five others in late September by a suicide bomber in a rickshaw, and Omar’s own brother, a local police chief, was killed in May last year.
OUTSPOKEN MILITIA COMMANDER
Omar was a militia commander in Afghanistan’s civil war who fought the Taliban as part of the Northern Alliance, although he hailed from the same Pashtun ethnic group as his opponents.
An outspoken man considered tough on security issues and broadly supported by the people he ruled, he was sometimes called "Engineer" as he had completed part of an engineering degree.
He criticized Pakistan for deadly meddling in Afghan affairs and also last year censured the German troops who make up the majority of foreign forces in the province.
"He was very active in trying to improve security and bringing rival tribes together to fight against the Taliban," said a prominent tribal elder from the region, Mohammad Akbar.
"His death is not only a loss to Kunduz, but to the whole nation."
The Taliban insurgency has spread from its heartland in the south and east to northern parts of the country, that until recently were relatively peaceful. Northern Kunduz province in particular has seen an upsurge in violence in recent months.
The war is now in its tenth year, and bloodier than ever.
More than 2,000 foreign troops have been killed since it began in 2001 -- over half in the last two years -- and U.S. President Barack Obama and his NATO allies are under pressure at home over an increasingly unpopular conflict.
In December, Obama ordered 30,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan to try to turn the tide, the last of which arrived last month. But he also plans to start bringing troops home in July 2011 and slowly hand over security to Afghan forces.