Irandaily | No. 4429 | World

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Kabul Suicide Attack Targets Gov’t Building

Suicide bombers and gunmen launched an eight-hour assault on the headquarters of the Kabul traffic police on Monday, Afghan officials said, in the second coordinated attack on a government building in less than a week.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the operation in which all five attackers and three traffic police officers were killed, interior ministry officials said, Reuters reported.
The attack raised the possibility that insurgents were shifting tactics, testing Afghan security forces in Kabul after a series of high-profile attacks on Western targets last year.
Violence across the country has been increasing over the last 12 months, sparking concern about how the 350,000-strong Afghan security forces will be able to manage once foreign troops withdraw by the end of 2014.
Last week, six suicide bombers attacked the National Directorate of Security (NDS), killing two guards. That attack followed December’s failed assassination attempt on NDS chief Asadullah Khalid.
“It’s very clear that more and more the Afghan security sources are getting into the lead, the more they are targeted by the insurgents,” said Brigadier General Gunter Katz, spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Monday’s attack began when three men detonated suicide bombs outside the main entrance and was followed by the two remaining attackers storming the unfortified area, Deputy Interior Minister General Abdul Rahman said.
The pair, armed with automatic rifles, battled security forces outside the building nestled between two police hubs and close to parliament and a road commonly used by Afghan MPs. Thick smoke rose from the compound and an Afghan Army helicopter hovered above as Afghan forces returned fire with rockets and machine guns.
The two gunmen were eventually killed by security forces, an interior ministry spokesman said.
“Honestly speaking, this type of attack, at the start of the year, indicates the coming months are going to be tough,” a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“The Taliban will want to display their presence and reach with these kinds of attacks in Kabul.”

French, Malian Troops Retake Town Seized by Rebels

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France said it had targeted “terrorist vehicles” in six of the strikes over the last 24 hours, and that the campaign against the militants was making progress.
French forces have extended their deployment northward from the central town of Markala, reinforcing their presence in the towns of Niono and Mopti, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard, a French military spokesman.
The French commander in the region warned of the risk of mines and booby traps in the insurgents’ wake. The region around Diabaly has long been a hub for Al-Qaeda-linked cells believed to have camps in the Ouagadou forest near Mauritania’s border.
France has deployed 2,000 ground troops and its war planes pounded rebel columns and bases in Mali for an 11th day on Monday. Its intervention turned back a column of rebels heading towards Bamako that threatened to topple Mali’s government.
France now aims, with international support, to dislodge the extremists from Mali’s vast desert north, an area the size of Texas, before they use it to launch attacks on the West.
The militant alliance, grouping Al-Qaeda’s North Africa wing AQIM and the home-grown Malian militant groups Ansar Dine and MUJWA, has imposed harsh sharia law in northern Mali, including amputations and the destruction of ancient shrines sacred to moderate Sufi Muslims.
French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Sunday French Rafale and Mirage planes had bombed militant camps and logistics bases around the ancient caravan town of Timbuktu as well as Gao, the largest city of the north. The strikes were aimed at preventing rebels launching a counter-attack.
Militants cited France’s intervention in Mali as their reason for attacking a desert gas plant in neighboring Algeria, seizing hundreds of hostages. The death toll reached at least 80 after Algerian troops stormed the complex at the weekend.
Veteran jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar claimed responsibility in the name of Al-Qaeda for the Algeria attack, Mauritanian news website Sahara Media said on Sunday. His Mulathameen Brigade has warned it will carry out further attacks on foreign interests in the region unless the war in Mali stops.

Algeria Siege Toll Passes 80

Algerian bomb squads searched a gas refinery laced with mines on Monday, looking for more explosive traps a day after the discovery of more bodies throughout the site raised the toll from the terrorist siege well past 80.
Special forces from the Algerian military stormed the plant on Saturday to end the four-day siege, then the government began the painstaking work of finding and defusing the explosives planted in what government officials said was a plot by the extremists to blow up the complex and kill all their captives.
In a statement, the Masked Brigade, the group that claimed to have masterminded the takeover, warned of more such attacks against any country backing France’s military intervention in neighboring Mali, where the French are trying to stop an advance by extremists.
“We stress to our Muslim brothers the necessity to stay away from all the Western companies and complexes for their own safety, and especially the French ones,” the statement said.
Algeria said after Saturday’s assault by government forces that at least 32 extremists and 23 hostages were killed. On Sunday, the Algerian bomb squads found 25 more bodies, said a security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
“These bodies are difficult to identify. They could be the bodies of foreign hostages or Algerians or terrorists,” the official said.
In addition, a wounded Romanian who had been evacuated died, raising the overall death toll to at least 81.
Two private Algerian TV stations and an online news site said security forces scouring the plant found five militants hiding out on Sunday and learned that three others had fled. That information could not be immediately confirmed by security officials.
“Now, of course, people will ask questions about the Algerian response to these events, but I would just say that the responsibility for these deaths lies squarely with the terrorists who launched a vicious and cowardly attack,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said. Three Britons were killed and another three were feared dead.
On Monday, Philippine Foreign Affairs officials said six Filipinos were among the hostages killed. Spokesman Raul Hernandez told reporters that 16 Filipinos have been accounted for and four others are still missing.
The dead hostages were also known to include at least one American and a French worker. Nearly two dozen foreigners by some estimates were unaccounted for.
It was unclear whether anyone was rescued in the final assault on the complex, which is run by the Algerian state oil company along with BP and Norway’s Statoil.
Authorities said the bloody takeover was carried out on Wednesday by 32 men from six countries, under the command from afar of the one-eyed Algerian bandit Moktar Belmoktar, founder of the Masked Brigade, based in Mali.
The attacking force called itself “Those Who Sign in Blood” and has claimed to have Canadians in the cell as well.
The Masked Brigade said on Sunday the attack was payback against Algeria for allowing over-flights of French aircraft headed to Mali and for closing its long border with Mali.
In an earlier communication, the Brigade claimed to have carried out the attack in the name of Al-Qaeda.
Armed with heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, missiles and grenades, the militants singled out foreign workers at the plant, killing some of them on the spot and attaching explosive belts to others.

Afghanistan Rejects UN Torture Report

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“Without deterrents … Afghan officials have no incentive to stop torture.”
The report is worrying reading for foreign governments supporting Afghanistan’s police and army, both with troops on the ground and financially. There are legal restrictions on handing over prisoners if they will face a substantial risk of torture, and even though transfers have been restricted, voters may be unhappy about funding security forces implicated in torture.
The Afghan government admitted there might be occasional lapses in a system it was still strengthening, but denied “severe cases of inhuman treatment”, dismissed the findings of systematic torture as “exaggerated”, and said insurgents were trained to allege torture if captured. The National Directorate of Security (NDS) also denied hiding prisoners or running secret jails.
The UN, which surveyed 635 prisoners, said it used high standards of proof and had dismissed 51 claims that were not credible. The survey also found the nature of abuse reported differed from jail to jail, but within individual detention centers was often consistent across months and prisoners from different insurgent groups. “It is improbable that training would be so well tailored to specific facilities … and the pattern of allegations of ill-treatment did not correspond with any identifiable ideological agenda,” it said.
The UN team, which visited 89 detention centers and was denied access to just one intelligence service jail, found “multiple credible and reliable incidents of torture and ill-treatment had occurred particularly in 34 facilities”.
The torture was systematic in seven police jails and two intelligence detention centers, all but one of them in Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban and long a stronghold of the insurgency. Torture by police and intelligence officials “was most prevalent” in Kandahar, the UN said.
It is also the only place where “disappearances” in police custody were reported.
Ten other intelligence service prisons and 15 other police jails across Afghanistan had multiple reports of torture, but the only other place where systematic use of torture was reported was the intelligence service’s counter-terrorism centre in Kabul.

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