As thousands of people swarmed around a hilltop shrine in Herat on Tuesday for the burial of Afghanistan's aviation minister, his warlord father demanded the government find those who killed him two days before or let his own people seek revenge.
The minister for civil aviation and tourism, Mir Wais Sadeq, 31, was gunned down by soldiers serving a rival of his father, Ismail Khan. Khan, the richest and most powerful of Afghanistan's warlords, is the governor of the western province of Herat.
The killing appears to have stemmed from the personal ambition of one man. Zaher Naibzadah, commander of Herat's 17th Division, a former comrade in arms of Khan, fled the city on horseback after heavy fighting at his family compound Sunday night. By Tuesday he was reported to be in his home province of Badghis, some 75km away.
Sadeq had gone on Sunday afternoon to the house of Naibzadah, who was appointed as commander by President Hamid Karzai. He apparently intended to remonstrate with Naibzadah about an altercation earlier between Khan and some of Naibzadah's soldiers. But Sadeq and three others were shot and killed outside the house, sparking a fierce firefight that lasted for several hours, before Khan's troops overran the compound.
Naibzadah initially said the death toll was up to 100, but it appears to be much lower. On Tuesday, a foreign diplomat, citing local hospital figures, said that 11 people had been killed and 13 wounded. Interviews at the scene of the fighting also indicated that a total of 10 or 11 people had died.
The killing of the young minister has enormous political ramifications. Supporters of Khan warned of a plot to undermine or unseat Khan, while the central government moved quickly to exert its influence in the region, sending in ministers and troops.
The government is deploying 1,500 soldiers of the Afghan National Army to Herat -- 1,000 of them have already arrived on US military planes. But the soldiers are moving tentatively and will meet local people and explain their presence before patrolling the streets, a US military officer with them said.
Karzai sent his defense and interior ministers and their deputies to Herat on Monday, and they all attended Tuesday's funerals of Sadeq and two other local officials gunned down with him, the head of police security in Herat, Ghulam Siddiq, and the head of counternarcotics, Ghulam Nabi. All three men were buried together at the shrine of Khoja Abdullah Ansar, a Sufi mystic and poet who died hundreds of years ago, overlooking the city.
The ministers expressed sympathy over the losses and outrage at the killings. But tensions between Khan and the central authorities are high, one foreign diplomat said, particularly with the interior minister, Ahmed Ali Jalali. Khan and his son had only just returned from meetings in Kabul with Karzai and Jalali, in which the president had tried to persuade Kahn to give up Herat and become governor of another province.
Supporters of Khan and members of Jamiat-e-Islami, the mujahidin faction to which he belongs, called the killings a terrorist attack and suggested that they were part of a wider plot to remove Khan.
Naibzadah, in interviews with news agencies since his flight from Herat, said Khan's forces attacked first. He said Khan had turned against him because of ideological differences, and because the governor refused to respect the central government's authority.
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