Two aid workers killed in attack on NGO

Following an attack on an Afghan NGO which killed two local aid workers and a soldier in the Panjwayi district of southern Kandahar city on Monday evening, an NGO security body has called on aid agencies to be more cautious in the field. "We call on the NGO community to raise awareness and take more and more precautions to protect their staff," Nick Downie, a project coordinator for the Afghan NGO Security Office (ANSO), told IRIN on Wednesday in the capital Kabul. ANSO's call follows the incident in Panjwayi when gunmen riding in a car opened fire on a building housing an Afghan charity, Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (CHA). According to local authorities, a soldier and two CHA aid workers were killed and another six soldiers were wounded. "It was [between] 11 o'clock [and] midnight. They first attacked the government post and then turned to the compound where our staff were housed and killed two workers on the spot and wounded one," Farid Waqfi, acting director of CHA, told IRIN. Waqfi said the armed men then set two tractors and a car that were parked in the compound on fire. Waqfi said it was the second time in a year that the health and agricultural agency had been targeted by insurgent attacks. "Three CHA cars were burned last year in Kandahar but no one was hurt that time." ANSO expressed concern over a series of incidents that have targeted NGOs operating in Afghanistan's volatile south. Just two days before the CHA incident, armed men set on fire road contract equipment of an Afghan NGO supported by the German GTZ aid agency, also in Panjwayi. According to ANSO, the most recent incident was an attack using explosives on a compound of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in the southeastern province of Logar on Tuesday evening. There were no reported casualties. A day earlier, two rockets were fired into the compound of a local NGO in the Mohammad Agha district of Logar, just outside Kabul. "Last year we had 11 national staff killed, and this year we now have 13 killed only in four months," Downie noted, adding that all of these 13 were national NGO staff members. Local authorities in Kandahar said Monday's attackers were Taliban militiamen. Panjwayi's police chief told local radio that his men pursued the attackers as they fled southwards and killed two of them. The renewed bloodshed has led to fears that security will still not be adequate in time for historic presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for September. "It's a vicious circle: aid workers die, NGOs pull out, basic needs are left unmet and ordinary people do things like grow opium to survive," an aid worker said.