KABUL: A Taliban suicide bomber detonated an explosives-packed vehicle in an attack on a Nato forces’ convoy on a road near a school here on Monday, killing at least one civilian and injuring 33 others.

The ministry of public health said 18 children, many of whom had been studying in the nearby madressah, were among the injured.

Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi said the attack had taken place in an overwhelmingly civilian area.

“Enemies of humanity detonated a suicide car bomb in front of a madressah,” he said.

The windows of nearby shops were smashed and debris was strewn across the street.

The Taliban claimed in a statement the suicide attack had targeted a minibus being used to transport Americans and Europeans from a military base to the Kabul airport, killing 10 foreigners and three of their Afghan associates.

A spokesman for the military alliance Nato’s Resolute Support mission in Kabul said no member of the mission had been involved in the incident.

The explosion, which left wreckage of mangled and smouldering vehicles, comes despite a renewed international push to jumpstart stalled negotiations with the militants.

A health ministry spokesman said four women were among the injured.

Afghan forces are currently battling to push out Taliban militants who seized large swathes of the key opium-rich district of Sangin in Helmand province.

The offensive has prompted the first British deployment to the volatile province in 14 months. The deployment, in addition to a recent arrival of US special forces in the region, has fuelled the perception that foreign powers are increasingly being drawn back into the conflict as Afghan forces struggle to rein in the Taliban.

POLIO WORKER: Two men on a motorbike shot dead a woman polio vaccination campaigner and severely injured her granddaughter in an attack in Kandahar.

The woman and her teenaged granddaughter were eradication-campaign volunteers, going house to house in the city when they were shot, provincial health official Abdul Qayum Pukhla said.

“Today was the last day of a campaign and as the workers were leaving a house, the gunmen opened fire on them and fled,” he said.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries that remain polio-endemic, according to the World Health Organisation.

When a global eradication campaign was launched in 1988, the virus paralysed more than 350,000 children in 125 countries annually.

The number of polio cases in Afghanistan has fallen from 63 in 1999 to 14 in 2013. Only eight new cases have been confirmed this year, compared with 108 in Pakistan.—Reuters

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2015