( Joshua Partlow / The Washington Post ) - Kandahar provincial police chief Mohammad Mojayed, in his office in February.
KABUL — The man who arrived at the police chief’s home one afternoon in early February carried a piece of paper. He needed a signature, the man told the chief’s brother, handing him the document. Was the commander home?
“I took the document, and I was on my way through the house when I heard this incredible boom,” recalled Niaz Mohammad, the brother of Kandahar’s provincial police chief. “I don’t know what happened. I just blacked out.”
The car bomb explosion that crumbled Gen. Mohammad Mojayed’s home that day was but one in a relentless series of assassination attempts against Kandahar’s top police official.
He survived at least three in recent months, but Friday afternoon his luck ran out.
A man wearing a suicide vest under a police uniform slipped into the courtyard of the heavily guarded police headquarters and approached Mojayed as he came out of his office. The explosion killed him and two other policemen and wounded three more. The Taliban took credit for the attack.
“His death is a great loss for the people of Kandahar and for the government,” said Bismillah Afghanmal, a parliament member from Kandahar. “I don’t think anybody else will be able to fill this gap.”
Mojayed’s death is a major setback for American military efforts in Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban and a focus of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign. He was considered a brave and capable leader, a reputation first earned in the war against the Soviets. Unlike his predecessor, who came from eastern Afghanistan, Mojayed was a native of the lush Arghandab River valley of Kandahar province.
“He’s from here. He has influence here,” Lt. Col. John Voorhees, commander of the U.S. Army battalion that mentors the Kandahar police, said in February. “I think the Taliban is feeling threatened because of his leadership ability.”
The earlier attempts on his life were watched closely by U.S. military commanders because Mojayed was an anomaly: one of the few members of the Alokozai tribe in positions of authority in Kandahar.
Since the start of the war, certain Pashtun tribes have flourished by seizing political power and lucrative U.S. military contracts. The Popalzais, the tribe of President Hamid Karzai, have dominated Kandahar politics through the president’s half-brother, provincial council chief Ahmed Wali Karzai, while the Barekzais have become rich by building and maintaining Kandahar Airfield.
The Alokozais, despite being the third-largest tribe in Kandahar, were largely excluded from power. Mojayed had lost his job in 2004 as an army corps commander amid bitter feuds with the Barekzais. Other Alokozai leaders were killed and forced out of the province. With their exclusion from government, some Alokozais gravitated toward the Taliban.
“We’ve been given some opportunities and development projects, but those things have not been on a level that can satisfy the Alokozai tribesmen,” said Shah Mohammad, the governor of Arghandab district, a predominantly Alokozai area and one of the most violent patches of Kandahar in recent years. “Things are not getting better. Things are the same for the Alokozais.”
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