Tuesday, August 19, 2014

For middle-class Kabul district, the insurgency comes home --- KABUL — Nestled at the base of the craggy mountaintops that loom over north Kabul, the middle-class neighborhood of Qasaba seems an unlikely place to be infiltrated by Afghanistan’s Taliban-led insurgents. -- It is ethnically diverse, in a country where bloody battles have been fought along ethnic lines, and its inhabitants hail from a generation of civil servants who worked for Afghanistan’s communist government in the 1970s. But Qasaba — flanked to the south by Kabul International Airport, and home to sprawling security compounds housing Afghan and foreign troops — emerged as a key new location for insurgent attacks this summer. -- Two brazen assaults here last month, including an hours-long siege of the airport launched from a residential building and a suicide attack targeting foreign advisers to the Afghan government, have residents worried they are now in the crosshairs of an insurgency that has long wreaked havoc in the rest of the country. As foreign troops prepare to leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, this dusty district of small bazaars, pastel-colored mosques and Soviet-era housing blocs is bracing for stepped up attacks on the major government centers in their midst. --- For residents of Qasaba in Kabul’s northeastern reaches — where there are more watchtowers than trees, and more armored cars than Afghanistan’s famed, fragrant rose buses – theirs is a story of a once-quiet community now grappling with the encroaching violence. -- People here attribute the rise in violence to a newly paved road that they say allows militants to more easily slip in and out unnoticed, and to a large construction site that police said insurgents used to stage the airport attack after disguising themselves as workers. - Read More, Erin Cunningham, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/for-middle-class-kabul-district-the-insurgency-comes-home/2014/08/18/31cd52cb-b734-4665-a3f3-61fdb99dee4f_story.html

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