Wave of attacks alarms international forces

The Kabul-based International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Wednesday that the security situation was not improving as the country moved towards elections due in September. "The security situation is far from being stable. It is deteriorating," Major Jacek Ciszek, acting chief of public information for the NATO-led peacekeeping force, told IRIN on Wednesday in the capital Kabul. ISAF's concerns follow several deadly attacks by insurgent groups around the country, which have seen dozens of aid workers and civilians killed and injured in the course of just two weeks. In the most recent attack, four civilians were killed and one injured on Wednesday morning when a bomb went off in the northeastern city of Konduz as a civilian car passed by, according to ISAF officials. "One civilian vehicle was hit by an explosion in Konduz this morning. Four civilians were killed and one injured," Squadron Leader Sean McFetrich of the ISAF press information centre told IRIN. He added that an investigation was under way by local police. The recent rise in the number of attacks on foreigners and aid workers has been blamed on members of the ousted Taliban regime and remnants of Al-Qaeda. Wednesday's incident followed a rocket attack near NATO headquarters in Kabul on Tuesday, wounding an Afghan soldier. Just prior to that, the head of the government's refugee department in the southern province of Kandahar was shot dead. Reports from Kandahar said Hamid Agha was killed outside his home by gunmen on a motorbike. At least two of his bodyguards were also shot. Last Thursday, 11 Chinese construction workers and an Afghan guard were shot dead when a group of gunmen stormed a camp housing sleeping Chinese road workers on the outskirts of Konduz city. On 2 June, three European medical relief workers and two Afghans were killed in an ambush in Badghis province. Responsibility for the attack was later claimed by the Taliban. Both Badghis and Konduz previously were viewed as relatively peaceful, and relief agencies fear militants are expanding their operations from the insurgency-plagued south and east. ISAF said these attacks were conducted by "those who do not like this country to be stable" and were aimed at trying to derail the electoral process, "but as far we know, the elections will take place in September and as far as ISAF is concerned we will do whatever we can to make it happen," the ISAF chief of public information said. With the post-conflict country struggling to recover from two-and-a-half decades of war, aid agencies say insecurity has hampered aid deliveries to certain areas. Meanwhile, the United Nations in Kabul told IRIN that all UN road movements had been suspended in Konduz after Wednesday's incident. "As a precautionary measure, all UN road movements in and out of Konduz have been suspended for 48 hours," Manoel de Almieda e Silva, a spokesperson of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, told IRIN on Wednesday