Bomber targets governor, Canadians; kills 4 Afghans

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A Taliban suicide car
bomber killed at least four Afghans in the southern city of
Kandahar on Sunday in an attack on the provincial governor as
he traveled with a convoy of Canadian troops, officials said.

Governor Assadullah Khalid survived the attack in the heart
of the city, and a spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping
force in Afghanistan said there were no casualties among the
Canadian troops.

“The target of the attack was the governor,” Khalid’s
spokesman, Dawud Ahmadi, said, adding that four people were
killed and 13 wounded.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf called Reuters from an
undisclosed location to claim responsibility for the latest in
a series of suicide attacks in Kandahar over the past few
months.

Two days earlier a suicide car bomber killed three
civilians and himself on a road outside the city.

The attacks come during the bloodiest phase of a
Taliban-led insurgency that has raged since U.S.-led coalition
forces overthrew the militants’ radical Islamic government in
2001.

More than 900 people have been killed in the insurgency
since the start of the year, half of them in May.

A rise in Taliban activity in the south coincides with
preparations for NATO-led peacekeepers to take control of
southern provinces from coalition forces, which have had a more
offensive mission to hunt down Taliban and al Qaeda remnants.