A suicide bomber rammed a Toyota sedan into a U.S. military convoy Friday morning on a busy Kabul street, triggering a blast that killed 14 Afghan civilians and two U.S. soldiers, officials here said. At least 17 other people, including a U.S. soldier, were injured.
The attack, carried out on the same block as the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy, was the latest of half a dozen bombings that in recent months have brought what was an almost exclusively rural insurgency onto the streets of the Afghan capital.
Friday's bombing came as Taliban militiamen are battling NATO troops in southern Afghanistan with unexpected aggressiveness and occupying rural districts there.
NATO officers meeting Friday in Warsaw debated a call from the alliance commander, Gen. James L. Jones, for member states to send as many as 2,500 more troops and additional combat aircraft and transports to the southern provinces.
Suicide bombings were all but unknown in Afghanistan until the past year. Afghan officials have charged that the attackers infiltrated from Pakistan, where they allegedly received training and weapons from Islamic groups or intelligence services.
Attack coincides with anniversaries
Friday's explosion tore one U.S. military vehicle in half and scattered chunks of charred metal and human limbs across the pavement, witnesses said. It shattered hundreds of windows in the nearby Makroyan apartment complex.
The blast occurred on the eve of two tense anniversaries for the country: the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, which triggered the U.S. military campaign that drove the Taliban from power the following November, and the assassination of the anti-Taliban guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before.
The bomber struck just a few yards from a traffic circle containing a monument to Massoud. A massive public ceremony commemorating Massoud's death is planned for Saturday.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called the crime "a heinous act of terrorism," and he said U.S. authorities here would work closely with Afghan security agencies to investigate it.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack as a "shocking and despicable" act that went "against the values of Islam and humanity." In a statement released by his office, he said that "enemies of Afghanistan are trying to hinder the country's progress towards peace and democracy by disrupting the peaceful life of our people."
In recent months there have been half a dozen suicide bombings in the capital, most of them aimed at U.S. or NATO convoys and facilities.
Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for U.S. military forces here, said 94 civilians and 28 foreign and Afghan troops have been killed by roadside bombs this year.
"We will continue to work together with the Afghan government and Afghan security forces to defeat Taliban extremists and protect the people of Afghanistan from this brutal common enemy," Fitzpatrick said.
Pakistan behind blast?
Witnesses to the midmorning bombing said they heard a tremendous explosion and saw bodies, including those of several women, thrown into the air. They said the dead included an elderly man who was selling used clothing from a pushcart and several brothers who were hanging up used jeans and shirts to display on a fence.
"I was just setting out my melons when I heard a sound such as I had never heard in my life," said Hamid Wafa, 20, whose left hand was injured by shattered glass from storefronts near his fruit stand. He said he had seen a white Toyota Corolla smash into the passing convoy. "If I knew who had done this I would kill him."
A man of 50 who gave his name as Qayoum said all the glass in his apartment windows had been shattered. He speculated that the attack was "the work of al-Qaeda and terrorists," pointing out that it had taken place near both the U.S. Embassy and the presidential palace.
Afghan, U.S. and NATO troops quickly cordoned off the blast site and stationed four tanks nearby. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy said that no one there had been injured but that the facility was closed for the rest of the day as a security measure.
Pakistan has denied the accusations that it is tolerating or helping the Taliban. Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged on a goodwill visit to Kabul earlier this week that there had been cross-border infiltration by Afghan insurgents hiding in the border areas, but he disputed suggestions that Pakistani agencies were aiding in those movements.
Friday's explosion was the deadliest attack in the capital since September 2002, when a pair of bombs hidden in a taxi and on a bicycle killed 26 people, injured dozens more and destroyed much of a downtown block of shops and hotels. Recent bombings in Kabul have included remote-control and suicide blasts. Last week, a NATO military convoy was bombed on a highway outside Kabul, killing three Afghans. Earlier this summer, remote-control blasts targeted public buses carrying Afghan civilian and security workers to their jobs.
