The assassination, witnesses said, was trademark Taliban: two men on a motorbike, the passenger opening fire with a Kalashnikov rifle, the driver making a quick getaway.
But the choice of victim signaled a new turn for the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic movement that was ousted from power and has been running a campaign of attacks against foreign and Afghan government troops in southern Afghanistan for months. This time, the assassinated person was Maulavi Abdul Manan, known as Maulavi Jenab, a member of the local district religious council, shot as he left his mosque last week. He was the third senior Muslim cleric killed by Taliban assassins here in the last 40 days.
In addition, the head of Kandahar's Ulema-u-Shura, or Clerics' Council, Maulavi Abdul Fayaz, narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded in his mosque as he was leading evening prayers on June 30. Twenty-seven people were wounded in the blast, 14 seriously, council members said.
Since then two other clerics, also members of their district religious councils, have been shot to death. One, Maulavi Ahmadullah, was killed with a pistol two weeks ago in his district of Dand, not far from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. On Wednesday evening, Jenab was killed in his district of Panjwai, southwest of Kandahar.
The killings come amid increased Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan. Local officials claimed to have captured 20 Taliban suspects in the last few days in two operations in Kandahar Province, one against a band of Taliban who killed two government soldiers last week. The authorities also caught a Taliban member trying to plant a mine meant to kill the governor of Oruzgan province north of Kandahar.
Maulavi Muhammad Haq Khattib, the deputy head of the Kandahar Clerics' Council, said the clerics were undoubtedly attacked by the Taliban.
The 15-member Kandahar Ulema-u-Shura and its smaller branches in the districts have been vocal supporters of President Hamid Karzai. By challenging the Taliban movement at the core of its legitimacy -- its claim as a religious authority -- the Ulema-u-Shura has drawn direct reprisals against its own members.
An Ulema-u-Shura edict, signed by dozens of clerics, says of the Taliban: "They are saying that foreign troops have captured our country and they are calling to start a jihad against them. Just by using the name of jihad, they are killing as many people as they want."
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