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Incident

Suicide bomb in south Afghanistan kills interpreter

08 February 2011 04:30 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A suicide bomber killed an Afghan interpreter working for U.S. forces in an attack on a customs office in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province Monday, police said, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
The bomber appeared to target U.S. troops meeting Afghan customs officials at the compound near the main city in Kandahar province, the heartland of the Taliban-led insurgency.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said one person was killed and five wounded, including two ISAF service members.
Kandahar provincial police chief Mohammad Mujahid told Reuters that the interpreter was killed when a teenage suicide bomber blew himself up near a group of U.S. soldiers and Afghan officials.
Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, with civilian and military casualties hitting record levels in 2010.
U.S. and NATO-led forces say they have made significant gains in the violent provinces of Kandahar and Helmand on Afghanistan’s southern border with Pakistan, but attacks are still frequent and the insurgency appears to be spreading to previously peaceful areas of the north and west.
In a separate incident in the south Monday, an ISAF service member was killed by a homemade bomb, ISAF said without giving any further details.
A child has also been killed inadvertently in an air strike during ISAF operations in southern Helmand province, the NATO-led force said. The child was found dead in a compound near the target of the strike.
In eastern Khost province, insurgents wearing Afghan army uniforms ambushed and killed a provincial official in the Baak district, Khost police chief Abdul Hakim Esaaqzai said.
Civilian casualties, often caused by air strikes and night raids, have long been a source of friction between the Afghan government and its Western partners.
A U.N. report late last year found that civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose 20 percent in the first 10 months of 2010 compared with 2009, with more than three-quarters killed or wounded by insurgents.
The report found that there were 6,215 civilian casualties in that period, with those caused by Afghan and foreign "pro-government" forces accounting for 12 percent of the total, an 18 percent drop on the same period in 2009.
Rules governing air strikes and night raids have been tightened significantly by NATO-led forces in the past two years.