- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 March 2010 18.29 GMT
Members of the Afghan national army guard one of the sites in Kandahar hit in a series of bombings. Photograph: Humayoun Shiab/EPA
A series of fatal bomb attacks in Kandahar was a warning to Nato forces that the Taliban is ready to challenge a coming offensive to take control of the area, a spokesman for the militants said today.
Insurgents let off a series of bombs yesterday evening in an apparent attempt to repeat their coup of June 2008 when bombers destroyed part of the city's prison, releasing hundreds of Taliban prisoners. The ministry of interior said at least 35 people were killed and 57 wounded in the latest attacks. The dead included 13 police officers and 22 civilians.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said the bombings showed that the militants were still capable of carrying out major attacks despite the build-up of foreign troops before the push by Nato this summer. "With all the preparations they have taken, still they are not able to stop us," he told Associated Press.
In Kandahar, residents said the city was struggling to return to normal life. "People are afraid because this shows the strength of the Taliban in Kandahar," said Abdul Karim, owner of a construction company in the city. "They have close links to city officials and target whatever they want."
The governor of Kandahar province, Tooryalai Wesa, said two car bombs and six suicide bombers on motorbikes and bicycles struck near the city prison, police headquarters and a wedding hall.
The provincial police chief Sardar Mohammad Zazi said the attacks in different parts of the city appeared designed to distract soldiers and police from the militants' main target – the prison.
Wesa demanded that more troops be sent to a city already in the process of being reinforced, with 300 US military police on regular patrols since August.
Nato generals say Kandahar and its outlying districts will be the focus of intense military efforts in June and July as General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, pursues his strategy of trying to secure the more populous south of the country. Afghanistan's second city has suffered from a creeping Talibanisation as insurgents have grown in influence.
The militants, when unarmed, move unhindered around the city, using its backrooms to carry out their trademark swift justice and occasional executions.
Some of the few foreigners and aid workers there have predicted the city's eventual fall, not through military offensives but through the emergence of insurgents as Kandahar's main power brokers. Most analysts agree that reversing that trend will require an overhaul of a local government that is riddled with corruption.
In a recent interview, Brigadier General Craig King, the Canadian soldier in charge of planning future operations in the province, said improvements in governance would be more important than military operations during the summer push.
But changing the way Kandahar is governed faces an obstacle, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's half-brother who heads the Kandahar provincial council. Many Kandaharis believe he is involved in the province's drugs and criminal networks – charges he has always denied.
Despite pressure on the president to send his half-brother away most diplomats are pessimistic about that happening, with some even fearing that his removal would further destabilise the city.