AFGHANISTAN: Suicide bomb kills 18 in southern Helmand province while Kabul blast kills one Italian soldier and wounds 2 other foreign soldiers and five Afghans.

A suicide bomber killed 18 people outside the governor's office in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, provincial officials said on Tuesday (September 26). The bomb went off as foreign troops were passing through the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. NATO troops were in the area at the time but no one was hurt, an alliance spokesman said. Among the dead in the Helmand blast were six policemen and soldiers. The rest were civilians, many queuing to do paperwork for a pilgrimage to Mecca, officials said. Another blast to the south of the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Tuesday (September 26) killed a foreign soldier and wounded two others, police said. A senior police official, who declined to be identified, said an Italian soldier had been killed and two other foreign soldiers were wounded by a roadside bomb. Five Afghans were also wounded, he said. The violence this year has raised concerns for the country, a central battlefield in the U.S. war on terrorism. Optimism that followed successful elections in 2004 and 2005 has evaporated. The United States, which had been hoping to trim its Afghan force, has about 20,000 troops in the country. NATO, waging its biggest ground operation, has a similar number and is seeking more. President George W. Bush meets with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday to show support for a government that is facing the worst violence since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban five years ago. The bilateral meeting is a prelude to joint talks with Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Wednesday (September 27) at the White House to discuss fighting terrorism in a region where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding. Some tensions surfaced among the three leaders last week. Bush in a television interview said he would issue an order to go after bin Laden if there was firm intelligence about his location, including inside Pakistan. That prompted Musharraf to respond that Pakistan would handle such a situation itself. Karzai told the United Nations last week that foreign troops would not be able to end Taliban violence unless "terrorist sanctuaries" outside the country were destroyed, in a reference to Pakistan. Musharraf responded that "the problem lies in Afghanistan." In his autobiography released on Monday (September 25), Musharraf said his best guess was that bin Laden was hiding somewhere in Afghanistan's eastern province of Kunar. Bush has praised Karzai and Musharraf for being courageous in fighting terrorism and said that it was in their mutual interest to make sure Afghanistan succeeds as a democracy. Musharraf's government this month signed a deal with pro-Taliban tribesmen in the North Waziristan region that critics said may create a refuge for the Taliban and al Qaeda. Nearly 140 foreign troops, most of them American, British and Canadian, have been killed in fighting or accidents during operations since January.

ITN Source | September 26, 2006

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