NATO soldiers and children among dead in southern Afghanistan violence
An Afghan demonstrator gestures during a protest against the US and the government of Afghanistan in Kabul on May 18, 2012. Hundreds of Afghans, most of them clerics, rallied in Kabul to protest the signing of an agreement that would allow US troops to remain in the country after the planned transfer of authority in 2014.
Two NATO soldiers and at least two children have been killed in insurgent violence in southern Afghanistan.
"Two International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) service members died following an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan today," NATO said in a statement, without giving further details on the location of the incident or the nationalities of the casualties.
Meanwhile, Afghan officials told the Associated Press that two Afghan children were killed and four others wounded after a suicide bomber struck a police checkpoint near a marketplace in Tarin Kot, the capital of the southern Uruzgan province on Sunday.
It is not clear if the two attacks were related. Provincial police chief Matiullah Kahn told the Agence France Presse said that a NATO convoy had been at the police checkpoint at the time of the suicide attack in Tarin Kot, and that there had been NATO casualties.
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Taliban spokesman Qari Youssef Ahmadi said the Taliban were behind the attack, which comes as NATO leaders gather in Chicago for a two-day summit on Afghanistan’s future, which will be dominated by plans to pull some 130,000 international forces out of the country by the end of 2014, euronews reports.
Yesterday an Afghan suicide bomber killed 13 people – including children and police officers – at a roadside checkpoint near the Pakistan border in the Alisher district of Khost province.
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