A suicide bomber killed 17 people, including a police commander, inside a public bathhouse in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar yesterday in the country’s worst attack in over five months.
The bombing, which officials said wounded 21 people, was the bloodiest attack since July and comes after the end of the deadliest year in a war that has dragged on for more than nine years.
The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said three of its soldiers were killed in two separate attacks yesterday in the east and south of the country.
Zalmai Ayoubi, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, said the target of the bathhouse raid, which took place in the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistan border, was the border police commander. “This brutal and inhumane act was the work of the enemies of Islam and humanity,” he said, adding all the other casualties were civilians.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi said his hardline Islamist group had carried out the attack.
President Hamid Karzai issued a statement condemning the attack as “un-Islamic”. Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since late 2001 when US-backed Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban, with record casualties on all sides.
Last year, a record 711 foreign soldiers were killed, up from 521 in 2009.
Afghan security forces have been hit even harder than foreign troops. A total of 1,292 Afghan police and 821 Afghan soldiers were killed in 2010, according to the Afghan government.
Ordinary Afghans have borne the brunt as they are caught in the crossfire. The UN has said 2,412 civilians were killed and 3,803 wounded in the first 10 months of last year, up 20 per cent on 2009.
More than three-quarters of civilians killed or wounded were as a result of insurgent attacks, the UN said in a quarterly report last month, which the Taliban rejected as “fabricated”. The Afghan government has said 5,225 insurgents were killed last year.
Yesterday’s raid was the deadliest single insurgent attack since July 28th when at least 25 people were killed and 20 wounded by a roadside bomb in western Afghanistan.