Roadside bomb kills 12 in Afghanistan's west

By Sharafuddin Sharafyar Sharafuddin Sharafyar – Mon Aug 3, 6:16 am ET

HERAT, Afghanistan (Reuters) –

A roadside bomb attack claimed by the Taliban killed at least 12 people in west Afghanistan's most important city on Monday, officials said.

The remote-controlled bomb may have been aimed at a local police chief but killed mainly passers-by when it went off during rush hour near a blood bank in Herat, a relatively peaceful city near the Iranian border and an important commercial center.

 Nine foreign soldiers, including six Americans, were killed in Taliban strongholds in the south and east at the weekend.

Among those killed in Monday's blast were a woman, a 12-year-old girl and two policemen, said provincial security commander General Esmatullah Alizai.

A Reuters witness saw several women and children being carried out of ambulances on stretchers into a military hospital in Herat.

Alizai put the death toll at 12 and said Khoja Issa, a district police chief in the area, was also seriously wounded. Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf said Issa was the target of the attack.

Afghanistan's Interior Ministry put the death toll at 10 and said 29 were wounded.

Herat, one of Afghanistan's three largest cities, is usually a safe and prosperous center because of strong trade links with neighboring Iran and Turkmenistan.

DEADLY WEEKS AHEAD OF POLL

July was the deadliest month for foreign forces in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, with at least 71 killed. August has so far followed that deadly trend.

A total of 41 U.S. troops were killed in July, far more than the previous monthly high of 26 in September 2008.

Britain has also suffered its worst battlefield casualties in almost a generation, with the 22 killed in July taking its toll in the 8-year-old war to 191, 12 more than were killed in Iraq.

Attacks across Afghanistan this year had already reached their worst level since 2001. They escalated further after thousands of U.S. Marines launched a major operation in southern Helmand province last month, long a Taliban stronghold and the source of most of the opium that helps fund the insurgency.

The U.S. operation, along with a similar British offensive, is the first under U.S. President Barack Obama's new regional strategy to defeat the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan.

Civilians are also dying at record rates. The United Nations said last week 1,013 civilians had been killed between January and June this year, up from 818 in the same period last year.

The Taliban and other Afghani fighters were responsible for 59 percent of those deaths, the United Nations said..

(Writing by Golnar Motevalli Editing by Paul Tait and Bill Tarrant)

Three US, two NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan

Sun Aug 2, 2009, 6:38 am ET

KABUL (AFP) –

Five NATO soldiers, three of them US troops, were killed in Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, the force said Sunday, adding to a bloody start to the month in a growing fight against the extremist Taliban.

The three US troops were part of a patrol in eastern Afghanistan that was struck by a homemade bomb and then ambushed with gunfire, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.

"The patrol responded to the attack but three service members died in the engagement," it said in a statement.

ISAF, made up of around 64,000 troops from 40 nations, does not release the nationalities of its casualties but the US military in Kabul said the three were from its ranks.

Two other ISAF troops were killed when two bomb blasts struck their patrol in the south on Saturday, the alliance announced separately. They were not US nationals, the US military said, without being able to identify them.

The soldiers were killed the same day one French and three US soldiers in separate attacks already announced by ISAF.

"Yesterday was a very tough day for ISAF as we lost more brave soldiers who were striving to provide security to the Afghan population," the force said in a statement.

Seventy-five international troops were killed last month, most of them in attacks, according to the independent www.icasualties.org website, making July the deadliest month for troops since the US led invasion in 2001.

There are more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan mainly deployed under NATO and a separate US-led coalition that is trying to tackle mounting war attacks from a Taliban-led resistance.