Attacks announce insurgent "spring offensive" in Afghanistan

Kandahar province—the heartland of the Taliban movement and one of the centres of the insurgency—has been hit by a string of bombings this week.

Last Sunday, a suicide bomber detonated a massive explosive among a 500-strong crowd watching a dog fight near Kandahar city. Among the estimated 100 dead was a prominent pro-occupation warlord and police chief, Abdul Hakim Jan, and scores of his armed followers. The casualties are the largest number inflicted by a single suicide bombing since the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

The Taliban denied any involvement in the attack but there is little doubt it was carried out by an individual who sympathised with both its Islamic fundamentalist perspective and its resistance to NATO and the US puppet government headed by President Hamid Karzai. Dog fighting was banned as un-Islamic under the Taliban regime. According to Al Jazeera, it has become popular again in the areas where the occupation exerts control.