Afghan soldiers stand guard near the site of a bomb blast in Herat, Afghanistan, yesterday.
KANDAHAR: Militants killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan yesterday. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.
The violence — hours after the US military’s top officer arrived for consultations with Afghan and US-led coalition officials — illustrates the instability plaguing the nation as foreign forces work to pull nearly all their combat troops out of the country by the end of 2014.
The three US service members, two US civilians and the doctor were killed when the group was struck by an explosion while travelling to donate books to students in a school in the south, officials and the State Department said.
In a statement, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Americans included a department of defence civilian and the foreign service officer.
“She tragically gave her young life working to give young Afghans the opportunity to have a better future,” Kerry said. “We also honour the US troops and Department of Defence civilian who lost their lives, and the Afghan civilians who were killed today as they worked to improve the nation they love.”
Officials said the explosion occurred just as a coalition convoy drove past a caravan of vehicles carrying the governor of Zabul province to the same event.
Another American civilian was killed in a separate insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan, the US military said in a statement.
It was the deadliest day for Americans since August 16, when seven American service members were killed in two attacks in Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban insurgency. Six were killed when their helicopter was shot down by insurgents and one soldier died in a roadside bomb explosion.
A US official who spoke on condition of anonymity said several other Americans and Afghans, possibly as many as nine, were wounded. The State Department said four of their staff were wounded, one critically.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi claimed responsibility for the attack in Zabul and said the bomber was seeking to target either a coalition convoy or the governor.
“We were waiting for one of them,” Ahmadi said in a telephone interview. “It was our good luck that both appeared at the same time.”
The deaths bring the number of foreign military troops killed this year to 30, including 22 Americans. A total of six foreign civilians have died in Afghanistan so far this year, according to an AP count.
Provincial Governor Mohammad Ashraf Nasery, who survived the attack in Qalat, said the explosion occurred in front of a hospital and a coalition base housing a provincial reconstruction team, or PRT. International civilian and military workers at the PRT train Afghan government officials and help with local development projects.
Nasery said the car bomb exploded as his convoy was passing the hospital. He said the doctor was killed, and two of his bodyguards and a student from the school were wounded.
“The governor’s convoy was at the gate of the school at the same time the (coalition) convoy came out from the PRT,” said provincial police chief General Ghulam Sakhi Rooghlawanay. “The suicide bomber blew himself up between the two convoys.”
Nasery said he thought his convoy was the intended target.
“I’m safe and healthy,” he said in a telephone interview.
AP
