A bomb attack on US troops north of the Afghan capital yesterday killed three soldiers and three Afghan civilians, military and Afghan officials said.
The blast was near Bagram, a town about 50km north of Kabul, where the US has its largest military base in Afghanistan, officials said.
“Three International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] service members were killed and one injured after an improvised explosive device attack in eastern Afghanistan this morning,” ISAF said in a statement.
The US military and another ISAF official said separately that the bomb had hit US troops. They could not confirm Afghan statements that it was a suicide attack.
Afghan Ministry of the Interior spokesman Zemarai Bashary said: “A suicide car bombing has happened and the target was an international forces convoy.”
“The initial report we have received says three civilians were killed and three wounded,” he said.
The ministry said in a statement later two people were wounded.
The attack took place in Kapisa province, about 10km northeast of Bagram, and the dead and wounded civilians were passers-by, Bashary said.
It came less than a week after a remote-controlled bomb struck a convoy traveling towards Bagram from Kabul, killing a US soldier and a US civilian contractor.
Before yesterday’s bombing, 110 international soldiers had lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, a toll maintained by icasualties.org showed.
Most were killed in insurgent bomb attacks and in southern Afghanistan, which is a Taliban stronghold and sees the worst of the insurgency.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for yesterday’s bombing, but the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency reported that the Hezb-e-Islami faction of former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said it had carried out the attack.
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