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.
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