Mayor of Kandahar killed in latest setback for Afghan security

July 28, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

KABUL

A suicide bombing that killed the mayor of Afghanistan’s second-largest city Wednesday is the latest in a rash of high-level assassinations that have cast doubts over whether security gains in the Taliban’s southern heartland will survive the drawdown of U.S. “surge” troops.

Kandahar Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi, who was a U.S. citizen, died in his heavily guarded compound when a man detonated explosives hidden in his turban as Hamidi accepted petitions from tribal elders, officials said. At least one other person died, in addition to the bomber.

The assassination came just 15 days after the head of Kandahar’s provincial council, who was Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s half brother, was murdered by his chief bodyguard.

A Taliban spokesman called news media to claim responsibility for killing Hamidi, 65, who was close to Karzai’s family and had been the mayor for more than five years of Kandahar city, the cultural and spiritual capital of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban. He’d survived an ambush last year.

The new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, condemned Hamidi’s slaying “in the strongest possible terms.”

But in his first meeting with foreign journalists since he assumed his post Monday, Crocker cautioned against “a rush to judgment as to exactly who did this. It’s not clear to me, for example, at this point that this was a Taliban-conducted act.SDRq