Blasts, rocket attack kill five Afghans

by Sardar Ahmad Sardar Ahmad –

Sunday, June 20, 2010

KABUL (AFP) –

At least five civilians including children were killed and two dozen others injured in separate attacks on Sunday, officials said, as non-combatants suffered a bloody weekend in Afghanistan.

A rocket hit a house early in the morning in a district of eastern Nangarhar province, killing two children, an interior ministry statement said.

The ministry blamed the attack on Taliban fighters waging a bloody war against Afghan and US-led NATO troops.

Separately, twin bomb blasts in Lashkar Gah, capital of southern Helmand province, killed three civilians and wounded more than a dozen, provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi told AFP.

"The bomb, which was remotely detonated next to a Kabul Bank branch here, killed a 12-year-old girl and two adults, while wounding 15 other civilians," he said.

Minutes later, a second bomb exploded close to a high school and injured three more children, an adult and a policeman, Ahmadi said.

Ahmadi blamed the Taliban fighters for both attacks.

Civilian casualties are an incendiary issue in Afghanistan and are often used by the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban alike for political ends.

Civilians were also said to have been killed Saturday by a NATO air strike on a Taliban target and a separate shootout between Afghan forces and Taliban fighters.

At least five civilians, including two young girls, were killed in an air strike by NATO forces in the eastern province of Khost, police and hospital officials said.

NATO confirmed there were air strikes in the area against the Taliban's Haqqani network and said it was reviewing whether civilians were killed by the operations, which provincial police said also killed 38 Taliban fighters.

Villagers in a district of the western province of Badghis reported scores of civilians killed and wounded by crossfire in a Saturday shootout between Afghan security forces and Taliban rebels.

Men evacuating the injured to hospital told AFP that their relatives were killed and injured after police fired rockets on their homes after the battle with the Taliban.

Local government officials and a police spokesman confirmed civilians had died following a heavy gunfight between police and Taliban fighters, but could not immediately give figures for the casualties.

"We are aware of such incident in the area. Police have been dispatched to the area and they're investigating," Abdul Rauf Ahmadi, a police spokesman for western Afghanistan, told AFP.

Sharafuddin Majidi, a provincial government spokesman, said it was likely that at least three civilians had died and more than 30 others were injured.

2 blasts rock S. Afghanistan in weekend violence

By Deb Riechmann And Mirwais Khan, Associated Press Writers –

Sunday, June 20, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan –

Two bombs set up in push carts exploded minutes apart Sunday in a provincial capital in southern Afghanistan, part of a series of violent attacks across the country.

A young girl and a woman were killed and at least 14 other people were wounded in the first blast in front of a bank in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, the Afghan Ministry of Interior said.

"I was going to get my salary from Kabul bank and there was a blast," Afghan policeman Abdul Tawab said at the scene.

He was among Afghan security forces who were responding to the first bombing when they heard the second blast, which occurred in front of a high school about two miles (three kilometers) away.

Five people, including an Afghan soldier, were injured in the second explosion less than a half-hour after the first, according to Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor in Helmand province.

He said a third person had died in one of the two explosions, but it was unclear which one.

"We heard a big blast," said Gul Mohammad as he sat on a hospital bed being treated for a foot injury. He said one of the bombs was placed in a fruit cart. "Then I saw lots of wounded people everywhere."

North of Lashkar Gah on Saturday, two Afghan policemen were killed and five others were wounded when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Gereshk district, the ministry said.

In western Afghanistan, three Taliban fighters were killed and 33 others were wounded in a clash with police Sunday morning.

Sharafudin Najebi, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Badghis province, said the fighting occurred after local residents complained that insurgents were extorting money from farmers who are harvesting their crops. He said that after a civilian was killed in the fighting, the residents requested help from Afghan security forces who killed the attackers.

In the east, Afghan authorities reported civilian casualties in what NATO said was an attack late Friday and Saturday against the Haqqani network, awing of the Taliban, along the border between Khost and Paktia provinces in southeastern Afghanistan. NATO said the attack included precision missile strikes against "a large number of armed insurgents."

Shafiq Mujahid, head of the Khost provincial council said at least six civilians, including five children and one woman, were killed in the airstrike and 13 other civilians were wounded.

NATO said it was investigating reports of civilian deaths and would accept full responsibility if innocent people were "unintentionally harmed."

Also in the east, rockets fired by Taliban fighters over the weekend struck two homes, killing four civilians, the ministry said.

One rocket landed on a house in Qarghay district of Laghman province, killing two women and injuring two other adults Saturday. Another rocket, apparently targeting an airport in the Behsud district of Nangarhar province, struck a house on Sunday, killing two children and injuring three men and a woman.

In fighting on Saturday in a different part of Nangarhar, 10 Taliban fighters were killed and eight others wounded in a 30-minute clash in Sherzad district, said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Nangarhar.

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Khan reported from Kandahar. Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul also contributed to this report.