KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – A rocket fired into the Afghan capital late Sunday killed a woman living close to the headquarters of international peacekeepers, residents and the international force said.
Neighbors said the rocket smashed into a tree in the courtyard of a two-story house in Kabul’s Shash Darak district, killing a women in her 40s.
“A piece of shrapnel hit her in the neck,” said Abdul Basir, a doctor from one of the four families sharing the house.
The woman’s body, initially rushed to the nearest hospital, was returned half an hour later by taxi, wrapped in a white cloth.
Two of her seven children, a boy and a girl, stood crying outside the house as peacekeepers and police looked on. “Where were you when the rockets came? Where is our mother?” they wailed.
The area is about 300 yards from the command compound of the 6,400-strong International Security Assistance Force and slightly farther from the U.S. Embassy and President Hamid Karzai’s palace.
“ISAF should move out of this residential area,” Basir said. “We have been rocketed several times because of you.”
Canadian Maj. Rita LePage, a spokeswoman for the peacekeepers, confirmed that a woman had died.
NATO troops were investigating two other explosions just to the north of the Kabul airport, she said. “It was rocket or mortar fire,” LePage said. She had no word of other casualties.
The force’s Dutch helicopter gunships could be heard patrolling overhead more than an hour after the explosions echoed across the darkened city.
Rockets are regularly fired at Afghan cities and U.S. military bases around the country.
The attacks, routinely blamed on Taliban militants and followers of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, rarely cause serious damage or injuries.
Still, on June 15, a rocket injured a guard at a compound used by the Afghan intelligence agency adjacent to the peacekeepers’ headquarters.
Bases that house the bulk of the force’s troops are dotted around the periphery of the city. Several of them also have been targeted with rockets.
A peacekeepers’ spokesman said a farmer had alerted Afghan authorities earlier this week after he discovered two rockets rigged to be fired remotely from a position to the west of Kabul.
AP-ES-07-18-04 1523EDT
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