Bomb Kills 8 on Violent Day in Afghanistan - New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — Eight people were killed Saturday by a bomb hidden in a motorcycle that was parked in a crowded bazaar in northern Kunduz Province, according to the Afghan police.

It was one in a series of violent episodes around Afghanistan on Saturday.

In Kunduz, six Taliban insurgents were killed in a joint NATO and Afghan operation in the Goor Tepa area, provincial officials said. And in eastern Nangarhar Province, eight Taliban insurgents were killed in an unsuccessful attack on the NATO airbase in the provincial capital of Jalalabad, Afghan officials said.

Three NATO soldiers were killed in an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan, according to a statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, which did not release additional details.

The provincial police chief of Kunduz, Abdul Rahman Said Khaili, blamed the Taliban for the motorcycle bombing and said the attack killed six civilians and two Arbakai militiamen, members of local self-defense forces established in villages, in the Imam Sahib District. Twenty civilians, some of them children, were wounded, he said.

Last week, a Taliban ambush in the same district took the lives of four Arbakai militiamen, the police chief said.

The attack on the Jalalabad airbase, a joint NATO-Afghan facility, involved seven insurgents who wore Afghan army uniforms that concealed suicide vests and carried a variety of light and heavy weapons, as they tried to breach the perimeter of the base, said Col. Zhafor, the spokesman for the Nangarhar Province police, who like many Afghans uses only one name.

He said the attack was repulsed and the attackers killed by NATO helicopter gunships. The bodies of all eight insurgents were recovered, Colonel Zhafor said.

A statement from ISAF put the number of attackers killed at six, and said only two suicide vests were recovered.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, interviewed by cellphone, claimed that 14 suicide bombers succeeded in entering the base and killed 30 foreign service members, but that claim appeared to be exaggerated. The fighting was over by early morning, according to local witnesses.

It was the third unsuccessful Taliban attack on the airfield in the past year.

Afghan employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kunduz and Nangarhar Provinces.

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