A suicide bomber on Thursday killed 20 people — including three children — in a market in central Afghanistan in the deadliest attack against Afghan civilians in more than three months.
Suicide bombings and other attacks have become the No. 1 killer of Afghan civilians in the intensifying war between US-led forces and the Taliban.
A UN report released this week found that the number of Afghan civilians killed in war-related violence rose last year to its highest level of the eight-year-old war — with nearly 70 percent of the deaths blamed on the Taliban and their allies.
Attacks against purely civilian targets are less common in Afghanistan than in Iraq, where most of the violence is between rival Islamic religious communities.
The UN report said most of the 2,412 Afghan civilians killed last year were caught up in fighting between militants and NATO troops.
The attacker in Thursday’s bombing detonated his explosives in front of a currency exchange shop located in an arcade of stores in the town of Dihrawud in Uruzgan Province, a mostly ethnic Pashtun area about 400km southwest of Kabul. Thirteen people were wounded, a NATO statement said.
TRIBAL ELDERS
District police chief Omar Khan said the attacker may have been headed for a regular security meeting of NATO and dozens of tribal elders. Khan, who was at the meeting, could not explain why the bomber detonated his explosives before reaching the heavily guarded venue.
Lieutenant Nico Melendez, a NATO spokesman in Kabul, said he had no indication that the meeting was the intended target.
Khan said 15 bodies were recovered at the blast site, but residents told police that remains of five more victims had been taken away for burial. Another police official, General Juma Gul Himat, said three children were among the dead and that several shops were destroyed.
NATO troops from the nearby Forward Operating Base Hadrian responded to the blast and found a large amount of opium near the scene, the alliance said in a statement.
It was the deadliest attack against civilians since Sept. 29, when a bomb struck a crowded bus on the outskirts of the city of Kandahar, killing 30 passengers.
Civilian casualties have become a major issue in Afghanistan, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai sharply complaining about heavy-handed tactics by the US-led force. That prompted the top US and NATO commander, General Stanley McChrystal, to issue orders last year limiting the use of airpower and other heavy weaponry when civilians were at risk.
NATO officials say McChrystal’s orders were responsible for a drop in the percentage of civilian deaths that the UN attributes to international forces — down from 39 percent in 2008 to 25 percent last year.
Even the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued his own code of conduct last year, instructing fighters to ensure that civilians are not endangered by suicide attacks.
ROADSIDE BOMBING
Also on Thursday, a US service member was killed in a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan, NATO said in a statement without elaboration. The death was the fifth suffered by US forces in the past two days.
A suicide bomber targeted a police patrol on Thursday in the southern town of Musa Qala, killing an Afghan policeman and wounding four civilians, according to officials and NATO.
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