Attacks fueling fears in Kandahar

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Rockets, land mines and gunfire knock out the city's only power line -- leaving nearly a half-million people without electricity for days. A grenade is lobbed into a U.N. agency compound by two men on a motorcycle.

The recent attacks have caused no casualties but are chipping away at the veneer of relative calm and stability in Afghanistan's second-largest city and former Taliban stronghold.

"I can say these are a kind of terrorist act," said Kandahar's police chief, Gen. Mohammed Akram. "They create problems for our government but it's the people who suffer. These terrorists are not supported by the normal people, so in the near future, they will die out."

Akram said he believes either Taliban fighters in hiding or the fundamentalist Muslim group Hezb-e-Islami, led by former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, may have been responsible for the attacks. However, no arrests have been made.

At the heart of the Pashtun-dominated south, Kandahar has remained largely free of the factional fighting between ethnic groups that has erupted from time to time in the north and east, although traditional rivalries between local warlords have resulted in violence.

However, the attacks, most of which have occurred in the past few weeks, underscore emerging security concerns in southern Kandahar, where the U.S. military maintains one of its two major garrisons in Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago, a grenade was tossed into the compound of the U.N's Food and Agriculture Organization, shattering all the windows. No one was injured. The staff was meeting in a back room at the time. The assailants escaped after crashing their motorcycle into a truck.

As a precaution, Akram said, he has bolstered day and night patrols around the offices and homes of foreign workers.

"I think we are more alert because of it," said Wil Newman of the British aid agency Oxfam. Her offices have been reinforced with a nearly 6-foot-high wall of sandbags.

Targeting foreign aid groups in an attempt to destabilize a country that depends on international assistance is "not a new tactic here," said Robert Goodwin, director of programs and operations for Mercy Corps.

His group, one of the largest in southern Afghanistan and one of the first to arrive 15 years ago, has perhaps the tightest security of any nongovernmental organization, with armed guards and its own security officer.

"When you're working in a conflict zone, you're always in danger of becoming a target," Goodwin said, adding that a small rocket had landed 50 to 100 yards from the agency's perimeter walls more than a month ago.

The uneasiness has spread to the local community. In the past few months, power lines, fed by Kajaki Dam in neighboring Helmand Province, have gone down four times -- deliberately attacked at least twice.

Three months ago, authorities found small rockets fired into an electrical substation about 60 miles from the city. Land mines were discovered nearby.

"Some notes were sent threatening us not to repair the lines or else," said Fazal Ahmed, director of Kandahar province's electric energy department, who attributes the attacks to "political problems."

Meanwhile, unknown assailants fired assault rifles at power lines several times over the past three weeks, cutting electricity for several days. The outages have forced residents in the dusty, scorching city to retreat to the shade to escape temperatures from 115 to 118 degrees. Though air conditioning is not widespread, many residents have fans.

The city of Kandahar, with more than 450,000 people, now must rely on only one transmission line and one generating station, Ahmed said. A few lucky residents have small generators but even those were being overtaxed by the heat.

"We are very vulnerable. For everything -- cooking, factories, water supply -- electrical energy is used," he said. "If you want to make the city suffer, it's very easy."

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