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U.N. report finds attacks are up 20 percent and are at the highest level since U.S.-led invasion in 2001.
The damaged Afghan police bus is seen loaded aboard a truck after it was targeted by a suicide bomber in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday. A suicide bomber set off a blast in a bus carrying police officers, killing or wounding at least 13.
AP photo
KABUL, Afghanistan — Violence in Afghanistan has spiked to its highest level since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, with an Associated Press count of insurgency-related deaths this year surpassing the 5,000 mark and a U.N. report finding that attacks have risen by 20 percent.
A suicide attack Tuesday on a police bus in western Kabul killed 13 officers and civilians, including a woman and her two children who boarded the vehicle seconds before the explosion.
The bombing, which ripped the roof off the bus, was the second to target a bus in Kabul in four days. It came as insurgents turned up attacks against Afghanistan’s security forces during a year of record violence.
A new U.N. report found that while 76 percent of all suicide bombings in the country have targeted international and Afghan security forces, 143 civilians were killed by those bombs through August. The report, released in New York last week, also found that Afghanistan has averaged 550 violent incidents per month this year, up from 425 last year.
An AP count of insurgency-related deaths, meanwhile, reached 5,086 so far this year, the most deaths in Afghanistan since the invasion to topple the Taliban. The AP counted some 4,000 deaths in 2006, based on reports from Western and Afghan officials.
The AP tally counts more than 3,500 militants among the dead, but also more than 650 civilians killed either by militant violence or U.S. or NATO attacks. Almost 180 international soldiers have died in Afghanistan this year, including 85 Americans, a record pace. Last year, about 90 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan.
Insurgents have also launched a record number of suicide attacks — more than 100 — including two bus bombings in Kabul since Saturday that killed 43 people between them.
Four children were among the 13 people killed in Tuesday’s suicide attack by a man wearing a pakul — an Afghan hat commonly seen in the country’s north — and a shawl around the upper half of his body called a chador, said Amin Gul, who owns a metalworking shop next to the blast site.
“When the bus came, an old man got on, then a woman with two children, then the guy wearing the chador entered, and then a big boom,” said Gul, who witnessed the attack.
The seats in the front of the bus were covered in blood and small body parts, and workers washed blood from nearby trees after the attack. Ten people were wounded in the bombing, Health Minister Mohammad Amin Fatemi said.