A suicide car bomb blew up near US-led soldiers in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, wounding six civilians, authorities said, while other attacks left seven security guards dead in the insurgency-hit south.Meanwhile, nine Taliban-linked insurgents were killed in operations by Afghan and international security forces helping the government to fight a mounting extremist insurgency, they said.
The suicide attacker detonated an explosives-filled vehicle outside the city of Jalalabad near a convoy of US soldiers, provincial government spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told AFP. "Six civilians were wounded including two children but there was no harm to the American forces," Abdulzai said. One of the children was in a critical condition. Abdulzai blamed the attack on the "enemies of Afghanistan", a reference to the Taliban.
He said another US-led military convoy had accidentally killed a municipal worker in the same area when it knocked the worker off his bicycle.
The seven Afghan security guards, including two working with the US-based security company USPI, were killed in various attacks and bomb blasts in the southern province of Kandahar on Saturday, officials said. In the same province, unidentified attackers gunned down a religious cleric in Spin Boldak district on the Pakistani border late Saturday, an official said, blaming the Taliban for the murder.