Suicide bomber kills 17 at Afghan market

A bomber blew himself up in a crowded bazaar in central Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing at least 17 other people and injuring 51, officials said.

At least a dozen of the dead were children, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. It was one of the deadliest attacks in a year that has seen an escalation in suicide bombings by Taliban insurgents.

“Some of the children were walking to school, while other children were selling goods in the market,” said Gen. Qasem Khan, the police chief of Oruzgan province, where the explosion ripped through a bazaar in the town of Deh Rawood.

Among the injured were eight NATO troops who may have been the bomber’s intended target. U.S. Air Force Maj. John Thomas said alliance soldiers were on foot patrol in the market at the time.

The nationalities of the injured soldiers were not released, but that part of Afghanistan, a region where the insurgency is particularly intense, is normally under the protection of Dutch troops.

The suicide bomber apparently detonated his explosives outside a pharmacy as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization patrol entered the bazaar, Khan said. Some shops were destroyed.

The town, in a remote part of southern Oruzgan not far from the border of Kandahar province, is a magnet for residents of nearby villages who do their shopping there.

“An explosive like that was fairly indiscriminate, and they would have to know there would be civilians killed or injured,” Thomas said of the insurgents. “These are the same extremists who recently have made calls for protecting civilians.”

The issue of civilian deaths has become a sensitive one in Afghanistan, but not because of insurgent attacks. In the first half of this year, U.S. troops and their NATO allies killed more civilians than insurgents did, according to several independent tallies. It was the first time since the war began in 2001 that the majority of the victims in a six-month period died in operations carried out by Americans and their allies. More than 500 Afghan civilians were reported killed in the period.

Western military officials say they regret the deaths of bystanders. They insist that such casualties are never deliberate but rather the result of increasingly ruthless tactics by the Taliban, including the use of civilians as human shields.

The rise in the number of civilian deaths has stoked growing disenchantment within the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and some dissension among coalition forces as to the nature of their mission in this country. Last month witnessed an even greater surge in the killing of civilians. More than 100 noncombatants were slain in a week, and their deaths were blamed on Western artillery barrages or airstrikes in the south.

Last month also saw the deadliest Taliban suicide attack in Afghanistan since Western forces overthrew the fundamentalist Islamic group’s regime more than five years ago. A bus full of police recruits was blown up June 17 in Kabul, the capital, killing 35 people.

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henry.chu@latimes.com

Special correspondent Faiez reported from Kabul and Times staff writer Chu from New Delhi.