Editorial Note: The following news reports are summaries from original sources. They may also include corrections of Arabic names and political terminology. Comments are in parentheses.

 
2 NATO Soldiers, 4 Policemen, 6 Civilians Killed in Suicide Attack on NATO Patrol in Northern Afghanistan

April 4, 2012

Suicide bomber kills 12 in Afghan north

By Enayat Najafizada (AFP)–4 hours ago

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan —

A suicide bomber attacked foreign military forces in northern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing 12 people, officials said, as NATO's fatalities for the year passed the 100 mark.

"A suicide bomber targeted a group of foreign friends" near a park in Maymana, the capital of Faryab province, provincial governor Abdul Haq Shafaq told AFP. "They were military. There are casualties, dead and wounded."

Faryab, which borders Turkmenistan, is far from centres of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan's south and east, although the Islamist militia are present in some areas of the province and it suffers sporadic attacks.

NATO's US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said two service members died after an explosion in northern Afghanistan, but refused to confirm whether it was the same incident.

There were conflicting reports about the exact death toll and the identity of the victims after the suicide bomber blew himself up on a motorcycle.

Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, police spokesman for northern Afghanistan, described the blast as "powerful" and said six civilians and four policemen were killed, with 20 people wounded including four police.

"A suicide bomber with a suicide vest full of explosives and on a explosive-laden motorcycle targeted some foreign forces near a UN compound in Maymana," he said.

Most foreign troops in Faryab are Norwegian and Lieutenant Colonel John Espen Lien, a spokesman for Norway's armed forces, told AFP there were "at least 12 killed, but this number is not definitive".

No Norwegian ISAF personnel were nearby at the time, he added.

Earlier, provincial police chief Abdul Khaliq Aqasai told AFP that US troops had told him four of their personnel had also died.

A doctor at the town's hospital said the bodies of five civilians had been brought in, and 26 people were wounded.

The "foreign friends" group had visited the police headquarters in Faryab before going to the park to carry out filmed interviews with local residents, the governor said.

The Taliban could not immediately be reached for comment.

Norway contributes a little over 400 soldiers to ISAF's 130,000 troops, who are helping Hamid Karzai's government fight a decade-long Taliban insurgency.

NATO is scheduled to hand responsibility for security across the country over to Afghan authorities and withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014.

Relations between the allies have been strained this year by a series of killings of Western troops by Afghan security personnel, a massacre of 17 civilians blamed on a US soldier and the burning of Korans at a US base.

Night raids by special forces against insurgent hideouts have triggered popular anger and long been a source of friction with Karzai, who has denounced the NATO operations as reckless.

But US officials said Tuesday Washington and Kabul were close to an agreement to give Afghans more authority over the operations, calling for Afghan judges to issue warrants for the raids and putting Afghans in the lead on the ground.

Such a deal could remove the last obstacle to final negotiations on a long-term security agreement, which US officials hope to ink in time for a NATO summit in May in Chicago.

The Faryab attack came as the number of NATO troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year passed 100, according to an AFP count based on the independent icasualties.org website.

The war has cost the West hundreds of billions of dollars and almost 3,000 lives so far. The United States has suffered the most deaths at 1,924, according to icasualties, with Britain next on 407.

ISAF declined to confirm the total figure for 2012, which is slightly lower than in 2011, when 109 troops had been killed by the end of March, again according to icasualties.org.

ISAF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings said that across Afghanistan, insurgent attacks fell by nine percent in 2011 and in January and February they were down 22 percent.

"Every month since May 2011, there have been fewer enemy-initiated attacks than in the same period the year before," he said. "This is the longest sustained downward trend recorded by ISAF."

In February, the United Nations said civilian deaths from Afghanistan's decade-long civil war reached a record high in 2011.

A total of 3,021 civilians died -- mostly at the hands of insurgents -- up eight percent from 2,790 in 2010, according to its annual report.

Suicide bomber kills 10 in north Afghanistan

By AMIR SHAH | Associated Press –

April 4, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) —

A suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed at least 10 people and wounded 26 on Wednesday in a northern Afghan province, officials and police said.

Lal Mohammad Ahmad Zai, a police spokesman for northern Afghanistan, said the bomber blew himself up in Maimanah, the capital of Faryab province. It was not clear what the target was.

Zai said of the 10 people killed, four were police officers and the rest were civilians — including two women and two children.

Earlier, NATO said two of its service members were also killed in a bomb explosion on Wednesday in northern Afghanistan. It provided no other details about the attack or the nationalities of the two. It was unclear if the two incidents were related, but Associated Press video from the scene showed NATO vehicles at the explosion site.

So far this year, 96 NATO service members have been killed in Afghanistan, including at least 52 Americans.

Germany and Norway, who have troops in the region, said that none of their soldiers were involved. Both countries have troops in the north and Germany commands alliance operations in the region.

The director of Maimanah hospital, Abdul Ali Aleen, said six of the dead and the 26 wounded in the suicide bombing were brought to his hospital.

Abdul Satar Barez, deputy governor of Faryab, said the attack occurred near a park in downtown Maimanah about an hour and-a-half before noon.

Militants have stepped up their attacks in recent days, killing nine Afghan policemen and abducting 11 across the nation in the past three days.

The surge appears to be part of the militants' drive to assert their power as NATO forces, led by the U.S., try to build up the Afghan military and leave combat responsibility to the local forces by the end of 2014.

Attacks and casualties are also expected to rise around the country as the spring fighting season gets under way. Fighting in Afghanistan usually wanes during the winter months as Taliban fighters take a break because of bad weather. Heavy snow also covers many of the mountain passes used by the Taliban and other insurgent fighters to cross mainly into eastern Afghanistan from safe havens in neighboring Pakistan.