Five civilians, including three children, were killed and 24 other people were wounded in three separate attacks by Taliban militants in southern and eastern Afghanistan yesterday, officials said.
A rocket hit house early in the morning in Behsud district of eastern Nangarhar Province, killing two children while wounding three women and one man, an interior ministry statement said.
The ministry blamed the attack on “enemies of the people of Afghanistan” — a term often used to refer to the Taliban insurgents.
Meanwhile, a bomb blast near a bank branch in Lashkar Gah, the capital of southern Helmand Province, killed three civilians and wounded 15 others, provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi said.
Minutes later a second bomb exploded close to a high school in Lashkar Gah and injured three more children, an adult and a policeman, Ahmadi said.
Violence in Afghanistan has continued to increase in recent months, as has the use of improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a new report.
Ban’s latest quarterly report to the 15-nation UN Security Council, released on Saturday, confirmed what NATO powers fighting in Afghanistan have suggested — that the country is increasingly dangerous nearly nine years after a US-led invasion toppled the Taliban government.
“The overall security situation has not improved,” said the report, which was posted on the UN Security Council Web site.
The “alarming trend of increased improvised explosive device incidents and the occurrence of complex suicide attacks persisted,” it said. “Military operations also intensified.”
Most of the security incidents in recent months have involved armed clashes and improvised roadside explosives, which have proven ralespecially deadly in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the report said.
“The rise in incidents involving improvised explosive devices constitutes an alarming trend, with the first four months of 2010 recording a 94 percent increase compared to the same period in 2009,” it said.
There have been some three suicide attacks per week, half of them in the south of the country, it said.
There are also an average of two more complex suicide attacks per month — bigger operations involving more assailants — double the average for last year, it said.
“The shift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked to al-Qaeda,” it said.
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