A suicide car-bomb attack aimed at a convoy of Nato troops in southern Afghanistan killed at least 20 civilians on Thursday, a provincial police chief said.
The attack in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar province occurred south-west of its provincial capital near where two separate roadside bombs killed a Canadian soldier and injured four others earlier in the day.
”It was a suicide car attack, aimed at Nato, but which killed instead 20 civilians and wounded 13 others,” Kandahar province police chief Sayed Aziz told Reuters.
A Nato spokesperson in Kabul said he had heard of the bombing, but had no immediate information on any possible Nato casualties.
The attack, just days after Nato took over security from United States troops in the increasingly volatile south, is one of the bloodiest in Afghanistan for months.
Four Nato soldiers, including three Britons, have been killed since Monday when the group took over security for the south in the biggest ground operation in the alliance’s history.
Six other Nato soldiers have been killed in recent months as the alliance stepped up its deployment ahead of the takeover.
The Taliban, intensifying operations in recent months, have vowed to topple President Hamid Karzai’s US-backed government and drive out foreign forces.
Nato’s expansion into the south is aimed at allowing the US to cut the size of its forces in the country.
Afghanistan is going through its bloodiest phase since the Taliban’s ousting in 2001, with most of the violence in the south and east, where more than 1 700 people including militants, civilians, aid workers, security forces and over 70 foreign troops have been killed this year alone.
Another roadside bomb on Thursday, possibly aimed at a Nato convoy, wounded three civilians in the northern province of Baghlan, provincial officials there said.
Separately, 22 Taliban guerrillas were either killed or wounded in an operation by Afghan police on Wednesday in southern Helmand province, an interior ministry spokesperson said.
Yousuf Stanizai said only two police were hurt in the operation. There was no immediate comment from the Taliban. — Reuters