KABUL — Seven suicide attackers killed at least 21 people in near-simultaneous assaults Thursday in a provincial capital in southern Afghanistan in the latest violent incident to shake President Hamid Karzai’s government and its U.S.-led military allies.
The victims included 10 children and three women who died when an assailant crashed a vehicle into a hospital maternity ward and set off a cargo of explosives, officials said.
“The explosion was so powerful it rocked my house,” Mohammad Daoud Zaheer, a retired district chief who lives a mile from the hospital, said in a telephone interview.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks, which seemed certain to keep Karzai and his U.S.-led allies off balance and public anxiety running high amid a rash of high-profile assassinations and guerrilla-style strikes coinciding with the start of a drawdown of 33,000 U.S. troops from southern Afghanistan.
Afghan officials said that at least 38 people, including at least three police officers, were wounded in six hours of mayhem in Tarin Kot, the capital of Urozgan province, north of Kandahar.
The assailants targeted the governor’s tightly guarded compound, where the provincial hospital is located, as well as the police headquarters and a private security firm. The security firm’s owner, Matiullah Khan, a local power baron, escaped injury; his uncle, former Urozgan governor and Karzai aide Jan Mohammad Khan, was assassinated 10 days ago.
The provincial radio and television station was damaged by the vehicle bomb that hit the firm’s compound, killing a reporter who also worked for the BBC World Service’s Pashto-language service, officials said.
In calls to news agencies, a Taliban spokesman who claimed responsibility for the attacks expressed “regret” for the death of the radio reporter, Ahmad Omed Khpluwak.
Australian troops and helicopters from the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force eventually intervened to end the fighting, said Mohibullah, the director of the provincial police anti-crime bureau, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name.
