Suicide attack, clashes kill 20 in Afghanistan
KABUL, March 13, 2008 (AFP) — A suicide car bomb attack on a convoy of US troops killed six Afghan civilians in Kabul on Thursday, while fresh violence in the restive south left at least 15 Taliban fighters and policemen dead.
The extremist Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the rush-hour blast on the road to the capital's international airport, in which four US troops also suffered minor injuries and 33 Afghans were wounded.
Kabul police chief General Salim Ahsas told AFP that six people were killed in the suicide car bomb attack on US-led coalition forces. Health minister Mohammad Amin Fatimi said 33 civilians were wounded and blamed the attack on "enemies of Afghanistan".
The US-led coalition in Afghanistan confirmed that one of its convoys was attacked on the road to the international airport, which has seen several attacks in recent months.
"There were four coalition soldiers that were part of this convoy and again none of them were seriously injured," coalition spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Johnson told AFP.
Two coalition armoured vehicles were damaged, an AFP reporter at the scene said. Blood and scraps of human flesh littered the road along with the wreckage of cars, some of which were on fire.
The Taliban, an Islamic militant group that was in government in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, said it was behind the blast -- similar to scores of others carried out by the insurgents.
"We claim responsibility for the suicide attack in Kabul today," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a telephone call from an unknown location.
"The attack was against two foreign military vehicles which killed all the soldiers in the two vehicles."
The Taliban have often made claims about casualties from attacks which subsequently prove exaggerated.
President Hamid Karzai, who is on an official visit to Senegal for a summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, condemned the attack in a statement.
The heavily guarded capital has suffered a rash of recent suicide bombings.
The last attack in Kabul was on January 31 when a suicide attacker detonated his explosives-laden vehicle near an army bus, killing a civilian and wounding a handful of people including an army officer.
The most brazen came on January 14 when Taliban militants staged a multiple suicide attack on the five-star Kabul Serena hotel that killed at least eight people, three of them foreign nationals.
In southern Afghanistan's violent Helmand province, US-led coalition forces said in a statement Thursday that they had killed nearly a dozen Taliban militants in raids on rebel hideouts.
Separately in southern Zabul province Afghan and NATO forces attacked a Taliban hideout in Daychopan district overnight, killing three "foreign" Taliban and wounding six others, district governor Mullah Fazel Bari said.
In a separate incident a roadside bomb struck a police convoy Thursday on a highway in southern Wardak province, killing three policemen and wounding four others, provincial police chief Muzafarudin told AFP.
Meanwhile neighbouring Pakistan lodged a protest with the US-led coalition after saying that a US artillery strike on a Pakistani village in a tribal area near the border left two Pakistani women and two children dead.
The coalition confirmed a "precision guided ammunition strike" in Pakistani territory but said it targeted a Taliban commander's network and said it was not aware of casualties.
Last year was the deadliest of an insurgency launched soon after the Taliban's five-year government was ended in an invasion led by the United States with the backing of anti-Taliban Afghan movements.
Around 6,000 people were killed, most of them insurgents but also about 1,500 civilians.
