KABUL, (Reuters) – A Taliban assault on the restaurant of a luxury hotel, considered one of the safest places in Kabul and frequented by foreigners and Afghan officials, has swelled a tide of violence sweeping Afghanistan two weeks before a presidential election.
Taliban gunmen smuggled tiny pistols past the Serena hotel’s heavy security cordon and waited for the restaurant to fill up for an Afghan New Year dinner before emerging to shoot diners point-blank. Three children between two and five were found with bullets in their heads. Four of the nine dead were foreigners. Hours later, a bomb attack in the southerly Kandahar province wounded the deputy governor and left his chief of staff in critical condition.
The Islamist Taliban movement has ordered its fighters to use “full force” to disrupt the vote and threatened to kill anyone who participates in what it calls a Western-backed sham.
This week alone, seven or eight suicide bombers killed at least 11 people in the eastern city of Jalalabad, while 18 were killed by a bomb in a marketplace in northern Afghanistan.
