Aid agency suspends operation after deadly attack

Following an armed attack on a Danish aid agency in the central province of Ghazni on Monday which killed four aid workers and wounded one, the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR) said it had suspended activities pending a security assessment. "It is still being considered how should we react but now we have suspended all our operations until further notice," Gorm Pedersen the director of DACAAR, told IRIN on Wednesday in the capital Kabul. DACAAR said five Afghans including three non-DACAAR national contractors were travelling in a locally-hired vehicle towards a DACAAR field office in Makur village in the Ab Band District of the central Ghazni province when their vehicle was stopped by a group of about 10 gunmen. "The victims were taken from the vehicle. Each victim had his hands tied behind before the group was further tied together in one line," Pedersen explained, noting that the survivor reported the assailants as saying, "You were warned about working for NGOs". According to DACAAR, the victims were then fired upon killing four, the fifth pretended to be dead and survived. "The assailants then made off from the scene with the vehicle that had been used by the victims and the incident duration was approximately 15 minutes," the country director added. The survivor suffered four gun shot wounds. "I think the general anti-international activity has increased in the last six months and absolutely I have noticed increased incidents," Nick Downie a security coordinator for ANSO, a new organisation acting as a security focal point for NGOs, told IRIN in Kabul on Wednesday. ANSO - a sign of the times - is based in Kabul with regional offices. It's job is to provide security advice and regular information to the aid community in Afghanistan. "The NGOs have been and are being targeted as we have seen with the DACAAR incident as the most recent," the security coordinator underlined. DACAAR is one of the largest international agencies in Afghanistan with 1,100 local and 13 international staff at work in more than 20 provinces of the country providing water supply and rural development services. The Danish NGO said although Monday's attack was first incident which involved loss of life, it had received many threats in the past few months. "It was the first incident in which our staff was killed, however prior to this, we had had cars burned and on one occasion our team was stopped by people threatening to stop our work in Paktya," the agency director ascertained, adding that these threats had caused the organisation to pull out from certain areas as a result of security threats. In recent months there have been increased attacks throughout Afghanistan but mainly in the south, targeting government troops, officials and aid workers. Last month, two Afghans working for the Afghan Red Crescent were killed and three wounded when gunmen attacked their convoy in Ghazni on the Kabul to Kandahar road. "There has been a failure by the international community and a failure which has caused the [Afghan] government not to be capable of providing that security," Downie stressed.