Three NATO soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan Friday while a suicide bomb blast ripped through a fruit market in a small town, killing five civilians and a police commander, authorities said. The multinational NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) did not say how the soldiers were killed or give their identities.In another attack against foreign soldiers, a remote-controlled bomb struck convoys in Khost Province on Friday, wounding two soldiers in a US-led coalition that works alongside ISAF, a military official said.
Meanwhile, in the southwestern town of Zaranj near the border with Iran, a suicide attacker "detonated himself near our operations deputy who was buying things from a shop," Nimroz Province police chief Abdel-Jabar Pordili told AFP. The blast killed five civilians as well as the deputy provincial police operations chief, 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 carried out by the Taliban.
The Taliban did however claim an attack Thursday in Kandahar Province that the US military said killed two US soldiers. Afghan officials said two civilians also died and more than a dozen were wounded.