Taliban Insurgents Placed 300 Roadside Bombs in Ghazni: Officials

Following the tragic incident earlier this week in which a wedding
party hit a roadside bomb in eastern Ghazni province, local officials
said on Wednesday that they have reason to believe the Taliban placed
more than 300 similar explosive devices in the Andar District of
Ghazni alone.

On Sunday night, 19 men, women and children were killed when a bus
carrying them to a wedding celebration hit a roadside bomb. The
incidence was widely condemned by the public on social media and by
officials like President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan Ulema Council and
the United Nations.

Abdul Jame Jame, the head of the Ghazni Provincial Council, said that
the 300 Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) were placed on public
roads, on farms and open plains of Andar. However, how exactly local
officials had gained the knowledge of this figure was not disclosed.

Residents of Ghazni have said that roadside bomb attacks occur nearly
every day in Andar District.

Governor of Ghazni Musa Khan Akbarzada confirmed the intensity of
Taliban activity in the area and indicated security forces were
struggling to hold them at bay.

"Well it's not easy to prevent or stop the insurgents from placing the
roadside mines," he said.

Although insurgents are said to use the concealed IEDs in order to
target convoys of Afghan and coalition forces traveling throughout
provinces around the country, often the indiscriminate explosives
result in civilian loss of life.

Following the incident in Andar on Sunday, Jan Kubis, the UN
Secretary-General's Special Representative for Afghanistan, said the
tragedy highlighted the increasing toll that such devices are taking
on civilians.

IEDs, like the bomb that struck the wedding party, caused over a third
of civilian casualties in the first six months of 2013, according to a
UN report.

The UN's comments came the same day President Karzai spoke out and
denounced the incident as a tragedy that offended basic human values.
The Afghan Ulema Council also raised issue with the attack,
reasserting that the killing of innocent people was not "Jihad" and
was an unequivocal violation of Islamic teachings.

No one claimed responsibility for the blast, though most suspect
Taliban involvement.

Violence has risen in Afghanistan this year as foreign combat troops
prepare to leave by the end of 2014. There are currently around
100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, out of which around 68,000 are
Americans.

The Afghan forces currently number around 350,000 men and have largely
assumed responsibility for security operations. They saw one of the
bloodiest fighting seasons on record in 2013, suffering a
unprecedented amount of casualties that many officials suggested would
be unsustainable in the future.