KHOST – Twelve people were killed in two blasts near the Pakistani border in eastern Afghanistan Friday, including a Taliban car bomb which led to nine deaths near a district police headquarters, while ISAF claimed killing 30 Taliban militants in Kunar. The first attack came in the city of Khost, where nine people were killed and 40 others were injured, four of them seriously, public health official Amir Badsha Mangal said.
A local police chief, Abdul Hakim Eshaqzai, said a policeman as well as women and children were among the dead, adding that the city’s hospitals had been ‘overwhelmed’ by the influx of wounded. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP that the Islamist militia was responsible for the bombing. In a second incident, three police were killed in Nangahar province, which like Khost province borders Pakistan, after a roadside bomb ripped through their vehicle, a provincial spokesman said.
Meanwhile, international forces said more than 30 insurgents had been killed in a four-hour, overnight air raid in Kunar province, also in the east. “While on an aerial security patrol, the air weapons team positively identified armed insurgents in the area and engaged them,” the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement. “After the initial firing, a large number of armed individuals emerged from a nearby building and were subsequently targeted and killed by the air weapons team.”
And in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan province, a German soldier was killed and eight others were injured, four seriously, when a man wearing an Afghan National Army uniform shot at them at a base. ISAF later said a second of its soldiers had died in the incident. Another soldier whose nationality has not been confirmed was killed by a separate bomb blast in southern Afghanistan.
Khost, Nangahar and Kunar all border Pakistan, where the Taliban and other Islamist networks keep rear bases that Washington wants the Pakistani military to destroy to help suffocate the insurgency in Afghanistan. In 2009, Khost was the scene of the worst attack on the CIA since 1983 when eight people were killed by a suicide bomber who was reportedly a triple agent.
