Taliban say attacks will increase

By Saeed Ali Achakzai

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Afghanistan’s Taliban
guerrillas are gaining strength and will step up attacks
against government and foreign troops when spring comes next
month, a Taliban commander said on Tuesday.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for a blast on Monday
that the U.S. military said killed four troops. The Taliban
said nine Americans were killed and U.S. forces were helpless
in the face of such attacks.

“Taliban attacks will further increase with a decrease in
the winter cold,” a former Taliban governor of Kandahar
province, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Rahmani, told Reuters by
satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally eases off during the
winter months when mountain passes get snowed under.

But violence has surged in recent months, including 15
suicide blasts since November.

U.S. military officials say the Taliban have changed
tactics since suffering heavy losses in clashes last summer and
are now increasingly using roadside blasts and suicide bombers
against soft targets.

The four U.S. troops were killed when their armored Humvee
vehicle was hit by a blast in the central province of Uruzgan,
the U.S. military said.

Suspected Taliban insurgents burned down a school in an
eastern province in the latest attack on the U.S.-backed
government’s efforts to promote education. One guard was
wounded in the Monday night attack, a provincial spokesman
said.

The violence comes as the first 150 of about 3,300 British
troops were leaving Britain for the southern Afghan province of
Helmand.

The 150 Royal Marines commandos are part of an advance
party of 850 British troops deploying to Helmand this month to
help prepare for the arrival of the full contingent in the
summer, a British military spokeswoman said.

“HEAVY LOSSES”

Britain, Canada and the Netherlands are leading an
expansion of a NATO peacekeeping force into the volatile south
while the United States is hoping to withdraw 3,000 of the more
than 18,000 troops it has in a separate force battling the
insurgency.

Rahmani said the more foreign forces there were, the more
targets the Taliban would have to attack.

He said the Taliban had grown stronger since they were
ousted by U.S. and Afghan opposition forces after the September
11 attacks in 2001, and the suicide bombers were helping to
drive U.S. forces out.

“American forces have become helpless before the Taliban’s
suicide and other attacks,” he said.

“The Taliban are inflicting heavy losses on American forces
in men and material and it is to hide the cowardice and failure
of their troops that America is reducing its forces.”

While the British forces will be stationed in Helmand, the
Dutch will be in neighboring Uruzgan province. Canada will soon
have about 2,000 troops in Kandahar province, another insurgent
hotspot in the south.

The Taliban are fighting to expel foreign forces and defeat
the government but most Afghans say they need foreign troops in
their country to ensure security.

(Additional reporting by Yahya Nabawi in GHAZNI and Robert
Birsel in KABUL)