Bus bomb kills 14 Afghans
By Aref Karimi (AFP) – 14 hours ago
HERAT, Afghanistan — A bomb killed 14 members of the same family in Afghanistan Thursday, underscoring record violence levels as a US review said its strategy to defeat Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was on track.
The roadside bomb, blamed on Taliban militants, blew apart the minibus in which the family was travelling north of the historic city of Herat, near Afghanistan's northwest border with Turkmenistan.
It came after the defence ministry accused NATO of killing four Afghan soldiers in an air strike in a Taliban flashpoint area in the south, the deadliest zone for US-led troops fighting the nine-year insurgency.
"The incident took place in Kushki Kuhna district at 11:00 (0630 GMT). As a result 14 passengers, all members of an extended family, were killed," Herat provincial spokesman Rafi Behrozyan said of the bus attack.
"This is the work of the Taliban."
Four other people were injured and two more similar bombs were later found and defused in the same area, he added.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the deaths, which came as Afghanistan's roughly 20 percent Shiite Muslims marked the climax of the Ashura mourning ritual.
"The terrorists once again killed innocent people and on the sacred day of Ashura," Karzai said in a statement released by his office.
"By their cowardly act, they revealed their hostility to the religion of Islam and the Afghan people."
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) also vowed to help bring to justice those responsible for the "shameless insurgent attack".
In a separate incident in the south, the Afghan defence ministry said four soldiers died overnight in a NATO air strike in Helmand province.
"Initial reports we have indicate that an air strike last night killed four Afghan National Army soldiers who were on a patrol mission in Musa Qala district," spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.
ISAF said it was looking into what happened but could not confirm the deaths.
"The incident occurred after a combined Afghan and ISAF patrol came under small arms fire from insurgents," it said in a statement.
"The patrol called for a close air support mission in which a coalition aircraft positively identified the insurgent firing position and conducted an air strike."
More than 140,000 foreign troops, mostly from the United States, are based in Afghanistan battling the Taliban, which has been waging an insurgency since being ousted by a US invasion in 2001.
The US's long-awaited policy review said Thursday that President Barack Obama's "surge" of 30,000 extra troops for Afghanistan had led to gains against the Taliban and weakened Al-Qaeda but US gains were not yet sustainable.
It added that enough progress has been made to start a "responsible reduction" of forces in July 2011, a benchmark laid out by Obama last year.
Many analysts, however, now see the key date for Afghan policy as 2014, which NATO partners agreed last month as the target to hand full control to Afghan security forces.
Obama called Karzai to discuss the review Thursday, Kabul said, adding the two had stressed the need to build on progress over security as well as urging a "focus on the sanctuary of the terrorists."
That was an apparent reference to Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border, a base for Taliban fighters operating in Afghanistan and believed to be a global headquarters for Al-Qaeda.
Nearly 700 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan in 2010, more than in any other year since the conflict began.
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