[An Nahar] A roadside kaboom killed 10 civilians, including a woman and five children, and maimed eight when it destroyed a van in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, officials said.
The families were on their way to visit a relative who had recently returned from Mecca when their vehicle was hit in Dih Rawud district in rural Uruzgan province, district governor Nematullah Khaliqi told Agence La Belle France Presse.
"Four of the dead are men, one is a woman and the rest are children. Eight others, men, women and kiddies, are maimed," he said.
The corpse count was confirmed by Abdullah Hemat, a front man for the provincial governor.
Roadside bombs are the weapon of choice of hardline Islamist Talibs fighting Afghan forces and some 100,000 NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
troops in an effort to topple the government of President Hamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtun face on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
While the Taliban say their targets are military, civilians using the same roads are frequently the victims.
Earlier this month a roadside kaboom killed 17 civilians -- mostly women and kiddies -- on their way to a wedding party in western Afghanistan.
Afghan weddings are often lavish affairs, drawing hundreds of relatives and guests from far afield in the war-torn land, and the blast took the total toll among wedding guests on the roads to 46 in less than a month.
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