KABUL(AFP) (AFP) — A bomb tore through a military patrol in southern Afghanistan on Friday, killing three US troops, while a suicide attack at a fruit market killed six Afghans, authorities said.
The blasts came as the country braced for another tough year against an insurgency led by the extremist Taliban but which also sees attacks by other radical factions and groups linked to the massive opium and heroin trade.
The bombing of the patrol from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force took to 10 the number of foreign troops killed here so far this year. Two US troops were killed in a Taliban suicide attack Thursday.
"They were on a mounted patrol where they hit an IED (improvised explosive device)," said US military spokesman Colonel Jerry O'Hara.
"Three US soldiers were killed and one was wounded."
The blast occurred along Highway One, an often-attacked road linking the volatile south with the capital Kabul.
All of the other soldiers to die in Afghanistan this year -- Australian, British, Canadian and US nationals -- were also killed in the south, where insurgents hold sway in several districts.
In another attack, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a fruit market in the small southwestern town of Zaranj on the border with Iran, police said.
He walked up to the deputy police operations chief for Nimroz province, who was shopping in the market, and then detonated his explosives, provincial police chief Abdul Jabar Pordili told AFP.
The targeted police officer was killed along with five civilians including his driver, said the provincial governor, Ghulam Dastagir Azad.
Six other people, including a policeman and two children, were wounded, he said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast but it was similar to scores of others that have been carried out by the Taliban.
The Taliban did claim an attack in Kandahar province Thursday that the US military said killed two US soldiers. Afghan officials said two civilians also died and more than a dozen were wounded.
The US forces said separately that its soldiers killed five insurgents in a raid in the restive southern province of Zabul, targeting a Taliban militant who was "known" to have been involved in bomb attacks.
But the deputy police chief for the province, Jailani Khan, said the five were civilians -- a father, two of his sons and two nephews.
There was no way to independently verify the identities of the dead men.
Afghan authorities are separately investigating allegations that around 17 civilians were killed in a US operation in the eastern province of Laghman on Tuesday. The US military says 32 militants were killed.
The United States is the biggest contributor among dozens of nations that have sent nearly 70,000 troops to Afghanistan to help fight an insurgency fronted by the Taliban, who were in government from 1996 to 2001.
It is expected to begin deploying in the next months between 20,000 to 30,000 extra soldiers requested by commanders in Afghanistan, especially for the volatile south.
Nearly 8,000 people died in insurgency-linked unrest last year, more than 5,000 of them rebels, according to estimates collated from various groups including ISAF and the United Nations.
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