Soldiers loyal to a local commander shot and killed Afghanistan's aviation minister Sunday in the western city of Herat, setting off factional fighting with guns and tanks in which as many as 100 people died, the commander told The Associated Press. In Kabul, Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim demanded an immediate cease-fire, and ordered newly U.S.-trained Afghan National Army soldiers deployed from the capital to try to calm the city. The orders followed an emergency session of security chiefs of President Hamid Karzai's shaky U.S.-allied government, rocked by Sunday's killing of Mirwais Sadiq. He was the third top Karzai official and second aviation minister to die violently in office. Presidential spokesman Khaleeq Ahmed said only that Sadiq — son of Herat's powerful governor, Ismail Khan — had been shot in his car in unclear circumstances. However, a top Herat military commander, Zaher Naib Zada, told AP by telephone Sunday night that his forces killed Sadiq in a confrontation after the minister went to Zada's home to fire him.
| Guess that put a stop to that real quick! |
Afterward, Zada's forces and soldiers loyal to Sadiq opened battle with machine guns, tanks and rockets for control of his division's military barracks. The commander said between 50 and 100 soldiers were killed in the first hours of the ongoing battle, and that by early Monday, he was holding out with 700 men at the barracks against what he claimed were 3,000 fighters loyal to Sadiq. "We are fighting at close range, with AK-47s and grenades," the militia commander said.
| Have you considered leaving town in the dead of night with a few suitcases full of cash and maybe a couple of your favorite dancing girls? |
Aid workers, also reached by telephone, reported gunfire and heavy explosions and said they had been ordered to stay indoors. U.N. workers scrambled into a bunker at their headquarters. A police officer, Fahim, reached by telephone at the main police station, gave a different account from Zada's, saying Sadiq had gone to the residence to ask Zada about the killing of three civilians by his forces two days earlier. Karzai's defense and interior ministers were preparing to travel to Herat to try to determine the circumstances of the killing, and the battles that followed, said the spokesman, Ahmed. U.S. forces at an American base in the city manned defensive positions within their post, military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said in Kabul. Hilferty called the fighting an "internal" matter and said he knew of no American plans to intervene. The post holds fewer than 100 Americans, he said.
| "As long as they're not shooting at us, it's no skin off our fore. We're not gonna weep over either side." |
The president, who himself escaped a 2002 attempt on his life, said in a brief statement from Kabul that he was "deeply shocked" by the killing and offered condolences to the Herat governor. Sadiq was widely viewed as his father's representative in Karzai's government. |