Kabul, Nov 13: Taliban remnants are still claiming a role in Afghanistan's violence, even taking responsibility for attacks in which they seem to have played no part, two years after the hardline Islamic militia fell from power. An Afghan soldier fired at a coalition convoy in southern Afghanistan, killing one Romanian soldier and wounding another, a senior Afghan military commander, Gen. Said Mohammad, said.
Mohammad said the Afghan soldier, not identified by name or rank, escaped from the site of yesterday's attack, which probably had nothing to do with the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
But Taliban spokesman Mullah Abdullah Zabulwal claimed responsibility for that assault and for a car bombing that wounded two people yesterday outside UN offices in Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold.
Zabulwal, who spoke to reporters from an unidentified location in Afghanistan, would not identify the assailant, saying only that the men who had carried out both attacks had safely returned to their hideouts.
Gen. Zaher Azimi, the Afghan Defense Minister's spokesman, said that he couldn't immediately confirm the attacker was a soldier, but that if he was, it would be the fist time a member of the coalition-trained military force had attacked its allies.
Bureau Report