Kabul, Afghanistan – A suicide bomber blew up his car near a U.S. military vehicle Monday outside Kandahar, injuring four soldiers and adding to the violence in the restive south in recent weeks, officials said.
The man drove his Toyota Corolla cab close to a convoy of U.S. military vehicles, near a popular shrine west of Kandahar, and set off a bomb just before 9 a.m., said Abdulahad Fazli, secretary to the Kandahar provincial governor.
“The reason I say it was a suicide bomb is that our police found part of his head, his hand and his foot,” Fazli said.
Witnesses at first reported that several U.S. soldiers were killed, but that information proved false. The four injured soldiers were taken to the U.S. military hospital near Kandahar, a southern city that once was a stronghold of the Taliban. One of the soldiers was in serious condition; the three others were listed as stable.
U.S. military officials initially said the soldiers were injured by a roadside bomb, not in a suicide attack. Roadside bombs are common in Afghanistan. Suicide bombers are not.
But by the end of the day, the preliminary investigation showed that the attack probably was carried out by a suicide bomber, said Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition.
“The attack was directed against forces whose sole purpose is for the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” O’Hara said.
He declined to say whether those soldiers belonged to a provincial reconstruction team, troops who perform only humanitarian work in Afghanistan. But another U.S. military official confirmed that the soldiers were from a reconstruction team.
A self-proclaimed Taliban spokesman, Mullah Latif Hakimi, called two news agencies and claimed responsibility for the bombing. He said the suicide attacker was an Afghan.
Many worry that a recent surge in violence in Afghanistan indicates that insurgents are trying to ape tactics used in Iraq – suicide bombings and targeted attacks on the military. They fear the violence is aimed at disrupting parliamentary elections set for September.
