Afghanistan's vice president narrowly escapes death in Taliban attack
Afghan Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum has escaped unhurt from an attack by Taliban militants but one of his bodyguards has been killed in the assault.
Afghanistan's Tolo News quoted Kanishka Turkistani, a close aide to Dostum, as saying on Saturday that Taliban militants ambushed the vice president's convoy “few times” on the way from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city in Balkh province where Dostum had held a rally earlier in the day, to Jawzjan province in northern Afghanistan.
According to sources, the hour-long attack left several others, including two other bodyguards, in the convoy wounded.
Meanwhile, Bashir Ahmad Tayenj, spokesman for Dostum's Junbish Party, also said that the vice president was aware of a planned attack but decided to travel anyway.
In a post on Twitter, a Taliban spokesman said the militant group had carried out the attack and claimed four of Dostum's bodyguards had been killed.
At the rally in Balkh, Dostum said that he could clear northern Afghanistan of the Taliban within six months if only the government would let him.
Dostum survived death for the second time since returning from exile last year.
In July 2018, 23 people were killed and at least 14 others injured in a bombing carried out at Kabul's airport, where scores had gathered to welcome home the Afghan vice president from exile.
Kabul police spokesman, Hashmat Stanekzai, said the bomb attack hit near the airport's main entrance, where supporters were waiting to greet Dostum. He had left the airport in a motorcade only minutes before the explosion, which officials said appeared to have been caused by a bomber.
Dostum, a former warlord and an ethnic Uzbek veteran of decades of Afghanistan's occasional bloody politics, was mobbed like a celebrity as he left the chartered plane from Turkey, where he had been living since May 2017.
In separate attacks by Taliban militants across Afghanistan on Saturday, at least 30 people, including civilians and police forces, were killed.
Fighting in Afghanistan has intensified despite talks between Taliban and US representatives aimed at ending militancy in the war-ravaged country. The latest round of talks was held in the Qatari capital of Doha earlier this month.
The Taliban’s five-year rule over at least three quarters of Afghanistan came to an end in the wake of a US-led invasion in 2001, but the militant group still continues to attack government and civilian targets as well as foreign forces.
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