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Taliban storms Kabul’s culture ministry

An Afghan boy waits for customers at a generator shop in Kabul, Afghanistan, yesterday. PHOTO: AP

Taliban fighters stormed the culture ministry in the heart of Kabul, killing five people in an attack the Afghan president said aimed to derail the government’s new effort to draw militants into a peace process and end a seven-year insurgency.

The fighters shot their way inside the building, where one of the militants blew himself up, a police guard wounded in Thursday’s blast said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and gave a similar account.

“Our enemies are trying to undermine the recent efforts by the government for a peaceful solution to end the violence,” US-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a terse statement.

The attack came three days after senior Afghan and Pakistani officials decided at a meeting held in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, to reach out to the Taliban militants to propose talks on ending the insurgency.

The meeting was part of a process initiated in 2006 by US President George W. Bush and his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts.

“Our enemies are trying to undermine the recent efforts by the government for a peaceful solution to end the violence.”

— Hamid Karzai, Afghan president

The Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan said the two sides recently had contacts in Saudi Arabia. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the incoming head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, have both endorsed the efforts.

Karzai’s remarks suggested elements of the Taliban wanted to sabotage the nascent reconciliation efforts.

While the Taliban has regularly used suicide attacks against Afghan and foreign forces around the country, they rarely strike in Kabul.

Amir Mohammad, a police guard who was wounded in Thursday’s attack, said three assailants opened fire on police guards outside the Ministry of Information and Culture before entering its cavernous hall where one of them blew himself up.

“There were three people. They were running. They opened fire on our guard first and then they entered” the building, Mohammad told reporters from his hospital bed in Kabul.

The force of the blast flung Mohammed onto the street, where he lay unconscious among shattered glass and pools of blood.

Five people were killed in the attack, including a policeman, three ministry employees and a civilian, the Interior Ministry said.

An additional 21 were wounded, said Abdul Fahim, the spokesman for the Health Ministry, which supervises the hospitals where the injured were taken.

The culture ministry was a pointed target. Before the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban in late 2001 for sheltering al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the regime banned art, secular music and television, vandalized the National Museum of Afghanistan and destroyed artwork or statues deemed idolatrous or anti-Muslim.

Taliban fighters also blew up two giant statues of Buddha, cultural treasures that had graced the Silk Road town of Bamiyan for 1,500 years.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said three militants stormed the building by throwing hand grenades at the guards at the main gate.

A man named Naqibullah from the eastern Khost Province carried out the suicide attack, Mujahid said. The other two men fled, he said.

Though attacks in the capital are rare, on July 7 a suicide attacker killed more than 60 outside the Indian embassy in Kabul.
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