KABUL — A Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up among men washing in a bathhouse ahead of Friday prayers, killing 17, in an attack that showed militants can still strike at will in southern Afghanistan despite a NATO offensive.
Roadside bombs also killed three NATO service members in the south and east, while gunmen shot dead a police inspector in Kandahar’s provincial capital, bringing the day’s death toll to 21. Authorities said they suspect the Taliban assassinated the police inspector.
The day’s violence underscored the dangers in southern Afghanistan — and in particular Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taliban. Some of the fiercest fighting in the nearly 10-year war has taken place in the south, where international forces, bolstered by the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops over the summer, are battling to disrupt the insurgents’ network.
The bathhouse bombing in the Kandahar province town of Spin Boldak, just across the border from Pakistan, was the deadliest single attack in Afghanistan in more than a month. Zalmay Ayubi, the Kandahar governor’s spokesman, said 16 civilians and a police inspector were killed in the attack, and 23 were wounded.
The Taliban — in an unusual step given that 16 of the dead were civilians — quickly claimed responsibility. A Taliban spokesman in the south, Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, said the blast targeted the deputy of an influential border police chief.
The bomber struck about noon, as men gathered in the bathhouse on the main road heading out of Spin Boldak to the Pakistani border, witnesses and officials said.
In the town’s main market, the bathhouse is near a mosque popular with travelers going back and forth from Pakistan.
Twelve-year-old Mohammed Kamran, one of three Pakistanis wounded in the attack, was working at a barbershop near the bathhouse when the blast knocked him to the ground.
“I don’t know who carried out this attack, but when I opened my eyes, I found myself in a vehicle,” the boy said through swollen lips from his hospital bed in Chaman, the nearby Pakistani town where he was brought after initial treatment in Afghanistan. Bandages covered the wounds on his face and head.
President Hamid Karzai, whose government has been battling the Taliban while trying to bring its leaders to the negotiating table, denounced the bombing as an un-Islamic act.
Although U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has claimed some success in the south, it has acknowledged that the gains are reversible.
The Taliban continues to carry out suicide bombings and plant roadside bombs that kill Afghan and coalition forces, as well as civilians.
