KABUL — Rockets and machine-gun fire buffeted an Afghan government motorcade in an apparent assassination attempt on the president's brother on Monday, the brother said. A bodyguard was killed.
The second apparent attempt on Ahmad Wali Karzai's life in less than two months underscores the danger facing even the most well-protected Afghans in a country under siege from Taliban militants and going into a summer that many predict will be very violent.
An additional 21,000 U.S. troops have started arriving in Afghanistan as part of President Obama's plan to bolster troop strength enough to push back the resurgent Taliban. The group has stepped up attacks on international and Afghan government targets in the past three years, regaining much of the ground it lost in the first U.S.-led offensive in 2001.
Wali Karzai said his convoy was on the way back to Kabul from eastern Nangarhar province when gunmen attacked them in Surobi, a mountainous area about 25 miles from the capital.
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The younger brother of President Hamid Karzai was not harmed.
Wali Karzai was returning from a trip to the eastern city of Jalalabad, where he went Sunday to thank Nangarhar Gov. Gul Agha Sherzai for not running against his brother in this summer's presidential election.
Gunmen fired on the cars after they entered the Surobi pass, said Abdul Jalal Shamal, the Surobi district police chief.
Wali Karzai, who is the president of the provincial council of the southern Kandahar province, did not comment on who might want to kill him.
Kandahar province is the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamist militiamen who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and are now waging an insurgency against President Karzai's government.
The younger Karzai said he was certain that he was the target of Monday's attack because many people knew he had visited Sherzai and because the gunmen fired only on the front of the convoy.
Wali Karzai said Sherzai's decision to bow out of the presidential race would prevent potential tribal clashes in the southern region where both Sherzai and the president hail from.
Sherzai had been seen as one of the few serious rivals to Karzai's re-election hopes.
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