Afghan violence up 30 percent, UN says

KABUL, Afghanistan - Violence in Afghanistan has surged nearly 30 percent this year and suicide bombings are inflicting a high toll on civilians, a new United Nations report says.

The report said Afghanistan is averaging 550 violent incidents a month, up from an average of 425 last year. It said three-fourths of suicide bombings are targeting international and Afghan security forces, but suicide bombers also killed 143 civilians through August.

"Suicide attacks have been accompanied by attacks against students and schools, assassinations of officials, elders, and mullahs, and the targeting of police in a deliberate and calculated effort to impede the establishment of legitimate government institutions," according to the report, which was released in New York last week.

A suicide attack yesterday 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 Afghan government reported. It was the second bombing of a bus in the capital in four days.

The UN report didn't give any other violence-related numbers.

An Associated Press count of insurgency-related deaths, meanwhile, reached 5,086 in the first nine months of this year. AP counted 4,019 deaths in 2006, based on violent incidents reported by Western and Afghan officials. That was the first year AP compiled such figures.

The AP tally for this year includes more than 3,500 militants killed and more than 650 civilians dead from either insurgent violence or US or NATO attacks.

Almost 180 international soldiers have been killed. That includes 85 US military personnel, nearing the total of 98 American deaths reported by the Pentagon for all of 2006.

Insurgents have staged a record number of suicide attacks this year - more than 100, including the two bus bombings in Kabul since Saturday that killed 43 people between them.

Four children were among the 13 people killed in yesterday'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.

Ten people were wounded in the bombing, Health Minister Mohammad Amin Fatemi said.

Yesterday's explosion was the third attack in four months against police or army buses in Kabul.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber wearing an army uniform blew himself up in an army bus, killing 30 people. In June, a bomb ripped through a bus carrying police instructors in Kabul, killing 35 people in the deadliest insurgent attack since the 2001 invasion.

A coalition soldier was killed by gunfire yesterday morning while conducting combat operations in the northeastern province of Kunar. Three other soldiers were wounded, the coalition said in a statement. The nationalities of the soldiers weren't provided, but most soldiers in eastern Afghanistan are American.