Afghan President Hamid Karzai vowed to continue efforts to broker a peace deal with the Taliban yesterday, as he led thousands of mourners at the funeral of his assassinated peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Kabul police deployed thousands of extra officers as part of a security lockdown designed to protect the funeral prayers being offered at the presidential palace from increasingly brazen gun and suicide attacks.
Rabbani, president of Afghanistan during the 1992-1996 civil war and chairman of Karzai’s handpicked High Peace Council, was killed on Tuesday by a turban bomber purporting to be a peace emissary from the Taliban leadership.
Photo: Reuters
He was the most senior national leader assassinated in Afghanistan since the 2001 US invasion, depriving Karzai of a key Tajik ally in the increasingly fractious world of ethnically-riven Afghan politics.
Following the killing of Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, his kingpin in the south, and last week’s 19-hour siege of the US embassy, the government has never seemed weaker in the face of the 10-year Taliban insurgency.
However, the president insisted that the murder would not derail efforts to make contacts with insurgents, despite keeping up the fight.
“The blood of the martyred [Rabbani] and other martyrs of freedom requires us to continue our efforts until we reach peace and stability,” Hamid Karzai said. “We will continue our efforts to reach peace, which was the wish of martyred ustad [professor], but at the same time, we consider it as our responsibility to fight the enemies of peace with determination.”
He spoke as Rabbani’s body lay in state at the presidential palace, where hundreds of Afghan dignitaries and foreign ambassadors filed past the coffin, draped in the Afghan flag and covered in flowers.
The body is due to be buried on top of a hill overlooking the Afghan capital where hundreds of ordinary Afghans carrying pictures of Rabbani and banners had gathered to witness the burial.
Some angry mourners vowed to avenge the death of Rabbani, a prominent warlord in the fight to evict Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the 1980s who had a strong power base in the Tajik north.
Enayatullah, a Tajik university student, said: “We are all grieving, people here have lost a great leader.”
“We vow to take the revenge for Burhanuddin Rabbani. We also demand that the government detain those behind the killing of Rabbani,” he added. “We want those who organized this meeting [Rabbani’s ultimately fatal meeting with the turban bomber] to be put on trial, even if they are members of the High Peace Council.”
Police said thousands of extra officers were being deployed “on the highest state of alert” for the funeral, with the army and intelligence service also on standby.
Police, some in armored vehicles, and intelligence agents lined the streets, while a large security cordon was in place in the area near Rabbani’s home from which cars were banned and where pedestrians were being searched.
Unusually, the Taliban have so far refused to comment on Rabbani’s killing, but Afghan police and intelligence officials have blamed the militia.
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