Kabul: Taliban attacks rocked Afghanistan on Tuesday two days before landmark presidential elections, claiming at least 21 lives as a rocket slammed into the presidential compound in Kabul.
The violence, striking at the heart of the capital, followed renewed Taliban threats to sabotage Thursday`s ballot in which 17 million Afghans are eligible to vote, amid heightened fears they could stay away.
But the NATO-led coalition said despite a spike in insurgent strikes, less than one percent of polling stations are at risk of being attacked.
A suicide car bomb Tuesday targeted a NATO convoy on a busy road near a US military base and a market, killing 10 people including a NATO soldier, and wounding more than 50, officials said.
"Updated reports indicate that those killed were one ISAF service member, seven Afghan civilians and two Afghan civilian employees of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan," the NATO alliance said in a statement.
"Two ISAF service members and 53 Afghan civilians were also wounded in the incident," the International Security Assistance Force said.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed distress over the death of two UN staff in the second deadly suicide attack targeting NATO in Kabul in two days.
"All of a sudden I heard a big explosion. I don`t know what caused it. I saw my son wounded. I had to rush him out of the area," one Afghan man whose clothes were covered in blood told reporters at the scene.
"It was a suicide attack... targeting a supply convoy of foreign forces," said police official Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and for firing volleys of rockets into the capital and the eastern city of Jalalabad, where at least 10 people, mostly women and children, were wounded.
A spokesman for Karzai confirmed that a rocket hit the outer perimeter of the presidential compound.
In southern Afghanistan, the Taliban`s main powerbase, a suicide bomber walked up to an Afghan military checkpoint in Uruzgan province on Tuesday and blew himself up, killing three soldiers and two civilians, police said.
Attacks also killed an election candidate and three electoral workers in the usually peaceful north, officials said.
Two US soldiers were killed in the east as visiting US Republican Senator John McCain said troop levels needed to be "significantly increased."
Bureau Report
