The bodies of eleven men, at least five of them beheaded, were discovered in southern Afghanistan yesterday in what appeared to be the latest effort by the Taleban to terrorise people away from the country’s Government.
The corpses were discovered in a field in a remote part of Oruzgan province where US, Dutch and Australian troops are based.
Officials said that they were murdered by a flying column of Taleban raiders, who accused their victims of collaborating with the Afghan Government.
“They had been into the district centre to go to the bazaar,” said General Juma Gul Hemat, the provincial police chief. “They were on their way home when they were attacked.”
The men, from a mountainous village only accessible by donkeys and motorbikes, were riding home when the insurgents blocked their path, General Hemat said.
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Officials insisted that none of the men were employed by the Government and that they had only travelled to the district centre to go shopping. The insurgents had come from neighbouring Zabul province and fled before the police arrived, General Hemat added.
In a separate attack in Oruzgan the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force said that seven civilians working for a construction company were killed by a roadside bomb.
The insurgents have launched a countrywide intimidation campaign against anyone associated with the Government or US-led forces in a bid to paralyse Nato’s efforts to improve and empower the civilian administration.
Unofficial estimates put the number of assassinations at around two people per day in some parts of the country.
In Kandahar city, where Nato troops are focusing their resources at the moment, a key district governor was killed by a remote-controlled bomb hidden on a roundabout earlier this month.
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The death of Haji Abdul Jabbar was a major blow to US-led efforts to spread the reach of government.
Days before that it was reported that a 7-year-old boy was hanged in Helmand province to punish his family for daring to resist the insurgency.
At least two US soldiers were also killed in separate incidents in southern and eastern Afghanistan. June has been the deadliest month for US and Nato forces so far in the nine-year war. At least 83 have died.