Kabul: A huge car bomb exploded near the US embassy in Kabul on Friday, killing at least 16 people including up to seven foreigners, the worst suicide attack in the city since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001.
“Some of them turned into pieces,” a policeman said as rescue crews hosed down fires and washed blood and body parts from the road, metres (yards) from the entrance to the embassy. The attack, likely to have been aimed at a US military convoy, came just days ahead of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Police and rescue officials said at least 16 people, including up to seven foreign soldiers or security contractors, were killed in the explosion that stripped trees, wrecked cars and shattered windows for several hundred metres (yards) in either direction.
Taliban rebels told Reuters by satellite phone they carried out the attack, but did not say what the target was. The US military said at last two of its personnel were killed in the attack. "There are parts of body, blood and pieces of meat, shrapnel and broken glass everywhere," said Ahmad Zia Babori, who runs one of several pharmacies along one side of the road, across from a string of family restaurants.
"You see, this is the blood of an innocent man who was killed in this suicide attack," he added, pointing to a drying pool. U.S. and Afghan forces and private US contractors sealed off the scene as wailing residents carried off their wounded. Minutes after the blast, a cart laden with apples and grapes was still aflame in a blaze of red.
Dead bodies, mangled and mouths gaping, lay beside the road. The attack was unusual. Normally, militants do not strike on Fridays, the Islamic sabbath. But they have begun changing tactics as they have grown stronger over the past year or so. Taliban fighters began using suicide attacks late last year as part of a strategy to harry Western forces in Afghanistan and destabilise President Hamid Karzai's government.
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