By Steve Gutterman
The Associated Press, 12 December 2005
KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan are learning from tactics used in Iraq to help avert the suicide bombings that are increasingly common among Taliban-led insurgents, a U.S. military official said Monday.
A day after the second suicide attack in eight days targeting U.S.-led forces in the southern city of Kandahar, spokesman Lt. Col. Laurent Fox said that "we will continue to look at other measures we can use to stop these bombings that they use to kill innocent civilians."
Fox cast a series of suicide attacks by militants in Afghanistan in recent months as a sign of weakness, but he said coalition forces are developing new measures to counter them - and turning to their colleagues in Iraq for tips.
"We are sharing information with our forces in Iraq, where there are many attacks, and will continue to use that information to fight the problem here," he said at a news conference.
Fox would not describe the measures, citing the need for secrecy.
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives near a coalition convoy in Kandahar on Sunday, killing himself and wounding a passer-by, police in the former Taliban stronghold said. Fox said the attack occurred after the convoy had passed and that no coalition troops were injured.
On Monday, four coalition soldiers were wounded when their vehicle struck a mine in Kandahar province, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Mike Cody said. He would not reveal their nationalities but said they were in stable condition.
A week earlier in Kandahar, a Canadian soldier in the U.S.-led coalition was slightly injured in a blast that killed the attacker and a civilian. A suicide car bombing in Kandahar in November, apparently targeting Westerners, killed three Afghan civilians.
Two days before that, militants used twin suicide car bombs to attack NATO peacekeepers in the capital, Kabul. Authorities blamed al-Qaida for those blasts, which killed a German peacekeeper and eight Afghans.
Last month, Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak told The Associated Press that intelligence indicated a number of Arab members of al-Qaida and other foreigners had entered Afghanistan to launch suicide attacks, and cited similarities between attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The suicide bombings are part of the persistent insurgency that has produced the deadliest militant violence since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban from power in 2001, when they refused to hand over al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
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Citation: Steve Gutterman. "U.S. Forces in Afghanistan Change Tactics," The Associated Press, 12 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/12/AR2005121201540_pf.html
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