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Pre-Election Violence Feared in Afghan Market Suicide Attack

The rickshaw bombing that took place in Faryab Province killed several women and shopkeepers, as well as at least two children.
Photo via AFP/Getty Images

A suicide bomber detonated a rickshaw packed with explosives in a busy marketplace in northern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing at least 17 people and injuring dozens.

While no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, last week Taliban insurgents threatened to “use all force” to disrupt the country's upcoming election, which they condemned as a “plot of the invaders.”

“Make it known to each and every person of this society that their casting ballots and participation is considered assistance of the infidels and their stooges against Islam,” the Taliban said in a statement released on March 10. The group vowed to target poll workers, security forces, and any public site used for the election.

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“If anyone still persists on participating then they are solely responsible of any loss in the future,” the statement read.

Tuesday’s bombing took place in Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, and killed several women and shopkeepers, as well as at least two children. A pregnant woman was also among the injured. Although Faryab is relatively stable, the province has seen previous attacks, including one at a mosque that killed more than 45 people in late 2012.

The latest attack drew condemnation from local leaders, presidential candidates, and officials with the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), who noted that 190 civilians were killed in the first two and a half months of 2014 — an increase of 14 percent over the same period last year.

“The continuing rise in civilian deaths from IEDs is tragic,” UNAMA’s acting head Nicholas Haysom said in a statement, referring to the improvised explosive devices often used by suicide bombers. “Their use in a distinctly civilian location such as a market is atrocious and cannot be justified.”

The Taliban has been abducting campaign workers and terrorizing villagers in a series of attacks ahead of the election on April 5, including one in Faryab last week in which insurgents killed three village elders.

The bombing in Maimana’s busy marketplace appeared to signal a change in the Taliban’s strategy. Although there is a possibility that the attack is unrelated to the election, local authorities suspect that a nearby police headquarters may have been the intended target.

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“We don’t know enough about today’s attack, and we actually don’t know a lot about many of these attacks,” Patricia Gossman, a researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, told VICE News. “But this does seem to be an example of the Taliban expanding the range of targets to a broader group of people, and that’s very troubling, very disturbing.”

Human Rights Watch has noted that at least half of the 7,000 polling centers planned for the country’s election face serious security threats. It issued a statement earlier this month denouncing the Taliban’s threats and listing a series of recent kidnappings and killings carried out in connection to the vote.

“We’ve seen a bit of ratcheting up,” Gossman said. “Of course, there was a lot of violence in previous elections as well, but the statement the Taliban have issued suggests this is more of an escalation on their part. If this continues, it certainly could cast a shadow over the integrity of the vote.”

Afghans are set to choose among nine presidential candidates in the country’s first democratic transfer of power. Thousands of election monitors will attempt to prevent a repeat of the widespread fraud that marred the 2009 presidential vote, when Karzai was reelected. He is barred from running again because of term limits.

Martine van Bijlert, co-director of the Afghan Analysts Network, was cautious about blaming the Taliban for the rickshaw suicide bombing.

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“We are talking about violence and it’s appearing before the election, but it’s actually hard to know whether it’s related to the elections or not,” she told VICE News. “Some of it is just part of the general violence that’s going on all the time.”

If the Taliban did order the bombing, van Bijlert added that the group may not be eager to claim responsibility for an attack in which so many civilians with no apparent connection to the election died.

“So far, what we see happening on the ground does not fit with an actual order to ‘use all force to disrupt these elections,’ ” she said. “It rather looks like a propaganda effort, in which you keep up the pressure through psychological intimidation and irregular attacks.”

Van Bijlert noted that it is difficult to determine the extent to which the Taliban is directing these assaults. “We don’t know to what extent a group like the Taliban can fully control everything that happens. At some point, when you give instructions for violence, and when you provide the means for violence, you also lose some of the control over how it’s used.”

The Afghan government, for its part, has repeatedly claimed that it is capable of safeguarding the election — but the recent spate of attacks has raised more than a few doubts about this.

“It doesn’t seem clear that they can provide the kind of security that’s going to be necessary,” Gossman said. “It’s in the days before the election that we really see this kind of pattern of intimidation and threats, and how that’s going to affect the way that people feel about actually going out to vote.”

Follow Alice Speri on Twitter: @alicesperi