Kabul, Jan 28 (IANS) The deadly suicide attack by the Taliban in Kabul on Saturday that claimed more than 100 lives and injured nearly 200 others has shocked Afghans from all walks of life.
The Saturday attack is not the first and will not be the last one, Afghan analysts say, believing that the hardliner armed group like in the past years would continue to target Afghans in the future.
"Taliban militants by conducting such deadly offensives in Kabul and killing dozens of people, on one hand want to demonstrate their ability of organising bloody attack and on the other, want to lash out at the ongoing peace efforts," political analyst Nazari Pariani told Xinhua news agency on Sunday.
On January 20, Taliban militants stormed the luxury Intercontinental Hotel which has been frequented by foreigners and Afghan officials, killing 22 people including 14 foreigners and injuring over a dozen others.
Four US citizens, including an electoral campaigner of US President Donald Trump, were reportedly among those killed.
A rise in the Taliban' deadly attacks is taking place amid an increase in the number of US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan and mounting military crackdown on the armed insurgents elsewhere in the war-torn country.
Both the Afghan government and the US administration have been calling, some in a warning tone, upon Taliban militants to give up fighting and join the peace process to find a negotiated settlement to the country's lingering crisis.
"Another dimension of the Taliban deadly attack in Kabul on Saturday is to expose the security lapse of security organs and defame the government in the eyes of its citizens," Pariani, also editor-in-chief of leading newspaper the Daily Mandegar said.
Launching the complex attacks in Kabul, according to Pariani, can also demonstrate the complexity of the "proxy war" in Afghanistan and the "disability of security apparatus" to tackle the challenge.
"The recent attacks in Kabul, specially Saturday's bloodiest one which took the lives of some 100 people shows the extreme weakness of our security departments to identify terrorist threats and foil them before reaching their targets," university professor Abdul Qahar Sarwari told Xinhua.
According to Sarwari, the aim of thew Taliban is to "manoeuver their military might" on the one hand, and on the other hand, to defame the establishment in the eyes of the people. It wants to give the message that the "government is unable to protect its citizens".
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