KABUL, 7 October 2007 — A suicide car bomb struck a US-led coalition convoy near the Kabul airport yesterday, killing one soldier and five Afghans in the latest in a string of attacks by the extremist Taleban, officials said. The blast, the third suicide attack in the capital in eight days claimed by Taleban insurgents, set vehicles ablaze and sent plumes of thick, black smoke into the air.
The Taleban, driven from power in a US-led invasion that started exactly six years ago, had vowed to step up its deadly attacks during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. “One coalition soldier was killed,” a spokesman for the force, Sgt. Dean Welch, told AFP. He could not release the nationality of the man who died. Most troops serving with the coalition are US nationals.
Five Afghan civilians were killed and five wounded, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said. The wounded included a woman and a schoolgirl aged about seven, the Health Ministry said. President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned the blast and blamed foreign influences — a likely reference to Al-Qaeda or extremist elements in neighboring Pakistan said to support the insurgency.
“Such brutal and un-Islamic attacks have no room in Afghanistan culture and such plots are imposed on Afghans from outside,” he said in a statement. The coalition said the explosion, caused by a bomb-filled minivan, targeted two of its armored vehicles.
A wide area around the van, which was reduced to a small chunk of flaming metal, was covered in fragments of metal, broken trees and other debris. Tailor Mohammad Fahim was about to open his shop for the morning when he saw the explosion about 500 meters from the airport. “One of the two (coalition) vehicles flipped onto its side, hitting two civilian vehicles,” he told AFP. He said he saw a body taken from each of the civilian vehicles.
“I saw another guy dead. He had been passing by on a bicycle. I saw two foreigners — one was definitely dead. The other was laying down on the ground.” Kabul has been struck by a series of Taleban suicide attacks this year, the latest before today’s blast on Tuesday, which killed 13 people including a mother taking two of her children to school.
Four days earlier a similar blast claimed by the Taleban destroyed a military bus, killing 30 people in one of the worst attacks in Afghanistan since 2001. Yesterday’s attack was carried out by “one of our faithful and devoted mujahed (holy fighters),” Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed told AFP by telephone.
In other violence, two policemen were killed when militants opened fire on the vehicle of a district police chief in the northeastern province of Nuristan, provincial deputy police chief Daud Zarbah said.
