Monday, April 4, 2011
By Rafiq Sherzad
JALALABAD, Afghanistan |
Mon Apr 4, 2011 10:02am EDT
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A "rogue" Afghan border policeman shot dead two foreign soldiers on a training mission on Monday, and hundreds of people turned out on the streets for a fourth day of protests against the burning of a Koran by a fundamentalist U.S. pastor.
Up to a thousand angry residents in eastern Jalalabad city blocked the main highway to Kabul and set alight effigies of the pastor who presided over the Koran burning, said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, spokesman for the provincial governor.Hundreds held peaceful protests in neighboring Laghman and nearby Paktia provinces. In southern Helmand province, residents of Lashkar Gah were coming out for a demonstration when a thwarted suicide attack cleared the streets.Police spotted two men driving into the central court and opened fire, the Helmand provincial governor's office said.One was seriously wounded and the other managed to detonate his explosives, wounding one policeman and two civilians, but did not kill anyone.About 20 people have been killed and nearly 150 wounded over three days of protests in north and south Afghanistan that degenerated into violence, although other large gatherings in some parts of the country ended peacefully.Twelve people were killed and more than 110 woun!
ded in Kandahar over Saturday and Sunday, where demonstrators waving Taliban flags and shouting "Death to America" burned cars, smashed shops and sacked a girls' high school.On Friday, seven foreign U.N. staff and five Afghan protesters were killed after demonstrators overran their office in normally peaceful Mazar-i-Sharif city in the north.The protests were driven by anger at radical fundamentalist Christian preacher Terry Jones, who supervised the burning of a Koran in front of about 50 people at a church in Florida on March 20.Western political and military leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, have condemned the Koran burning, as well as the violence that followed.Those condemnations appear to have done little to placate anger or anti-Western sentiments across much of Afghan society.Jones has been unrepentant about the Koran burning and has since vowed to lead an anti-Islam protest out!
side the biggest mosque in the United States later this month.!
ROGUE AT
TACKThe shooting in Faryab of two foreign soldiers who were training Afghan police highlighted another challenge for U.S. and NATO forces as they try to prepare for a gradual handover of security responsibilities that begins in July.Abdul Sattar Bariz, deputy governor of northern Faryab province, said two American soldiers were killed at a checkpoint by a member of the Afghan Border Police, in what appeared to be the latest in a string of "rogue" shootings.
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