By Saeed Ali Achakzai
Reuters, 14 February 2006
SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan - Afghanistan's Taliban guerrillas are gaining strength and will step up attacks against government and foreign troops when spring comes next month, a Taliban commander said on Tuesday.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for a blast on Monday that the U.S. military said killed four troops. The Taliban said nine Americans were killed and U.S. forces were helpless in the face of such attacks.
"Taliban attacks will further increase with a decrease in the winter cold," a former Taliban governor of Kandahar province, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Rahmani, told Reuters by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.
Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally eases off during the winter months when mountain passes get snowed under.
But violence has surged in recent months, including 15 suicide blasts since November.
U.S. military officials say the Taliban have changed tactics since suffering heavy losses in clashes last summer and are now increasingly using roadside blasts and suicide bombers against soft targets.
The four U.S. troops were killed when their armored Humvee vehicle was hit by a blast in the central province of Uruzgan, the U.S. military said.
Suspected Taliban insurgents burned down a school in an eastern province in the latest attack on the U.S.-backed government's efforts to promote education. One guard was wounded in the Monday night attack, a provincial spokesman said.
The violence comes as the first 150 of about 3,300 British troops were leaving Britain for the southern Afghan province of Helmand.
The 150 Royal Marines commandos are part of an advance party of 850 British troops deploying to Helmand this month to help prepare for the arrival of the full contingent in the summer, a British military spokeswoman said.
"HEAVY LOSSES"
Britain, Canada and the Netherlands are leading an expansion of a NATO peacekeeping force into the volatile south while the United States is hoping to withdraw 3,000 of the more than 18,000 troops it has in a separate force battling the insurgency.
Rahmani said the more foreign forces there were, the more targets the Taliban would have to attack.
He said the Taliban had grown stronger since they were ousted by U.S. and Afghan opposition forces after the September 11 attacks in 2001, and the suicide bombers were helping to drive U.S. forces out.
"American forces have become helpless before the Taliban's suicide and other attacks," he said.
"The Taliban are inflicting heavy losses on American forces in men and material and it is to hide the cowardice and failure of their troops that America is reducing its forces."
While the British forces will be stationed in Helmand, the Dutch will be in neighboring Uruzgan province. Canada will soon have about 2,000 troops in Kandahar province, another insurgent hotspot in the south.
The Taliban are fighting to expel foreign forces and defeat the government but most Afghans say they need foreign troops in their country to ensure security.
Additional reporting by Yahya Nabawi in GHAZNI and Robert Birsel in KABUL
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Citation: Saeed Ali Achakzai. "Taliban say attacks will increase," Reuters, 14 February 2006.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-02-14T140014Z_01_ISL9309_RTRUKOC_0_US-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.xml
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