KABUL, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban said on Sunday they would attempt to derail elections this month and warned Afghans to boycott the vote, the first explicit threat against the poll by the hardline Islamists.
The Sept. 18 parliamentary election is seen as a litmus test of stability in Afghanistan before U.S. President Barack Obama conducts a war strategy review in December that will examine the pace and scale of U.S. troop withdrawals from July 2011.
Despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops, violence is at its worst across Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.
"This (poll) is a foreign process for the sake of further occupation of Afghanistan and we are asking the Afghan nation to boycott it," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
"We are against it and will try with the best of our ability to block it. Our first targets will be the foreign forces and next the Afghan ones. So we are asking people to not take part," he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Security is a major concern ahead of the vote, with four candidates killed already in recent weeks, according to the United Nations and government officials.
Another candidate was wounded, and 10 of his campaign workers killed, in an air strike in northern Takhar province on Friday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is investigating the incident but maintains it killed a senior member of the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the air strike.
The Islamists launched scores of small attacks against last year’s presidential poll but failed to disrupt the process significantly.
