KABUL: Roadside bombs and an insurgent attack claimed the lives of five coalition troops Wednesday, Nato said, while the Taliban took aim at the Afghan intelligence services, killing four people and wounding more than 30 in a pair of attacks, officials said.
The violence follows a surprise visit to Kabul a day earlier by US Vice President Joe Biden, who praised coalition advances made against the insurgency while noting that the gains were ”fragile and reversible.” Biden left Afghanistan for neighboring Pakistan Wednesday morning.
Roadside bombs have been the most deadliest weapon in the insurgent arsenal against international forces in the course of the Afghan war.
Nato said four of its troops were killed in eastern Afghanistan, three of them by a roadside bomb and one in an insurgent attack. Another was killed by a bomb in the south, the alliance said, bringing the total number of international forces killed so far this year to 16.
Last year was the deadliest of the nearly decade-long war for international forces, with more than 700 killed, compared to just over 500 in 2009.
Wednesday’s violence began in Kabul during the morning rush hour, when a suicide bomber on a motorbike struck at a minibus carrying Afghan intelligence service employees.
President Hamid Karzai’s office initially said four people had been killed in the blast, but later revised the figure downwards to at least two, saying it was based on more complete reports.
The Interior Ministry said one of the two killed was an intelligence service member and the other a civilian, while 32 people were wounded, including six other members of the intelligence service.
The powerful blast struck on a busy road in the western part of the capital, shattering the windows of dozens of houses. The suicide bomber’s body lay in the street near the wreckage of his motorbike as police and intelligence officials cordoned off the area.
About an hour later in the troubled eastern province of Kunar, a remote-controlled roadside bomb killed a colonel with the intelligence service and his driver, and wounded two bodyguards, said Abdul Saboor Allahyar, deputy chief of Kunar’s provincial police. The Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks.
