Suicide blasts hit Afghanistan, Taliban wage bloody offensive

Suicide attackers on Tuesday targeted NATO troops in Kabul and a police headquarters in restive southern Afghanistan, killing three people and wounding at least 60 as the Taliban’s bloody summer offensive showed no signs of letting up.A powerful blast echoed around the Afghan capital as a suicide car bomber hit a NATO military convoy on the main road to the airport, around 500 metres (550 yards) from the US embassy, killing at least one Afghan civilian and wounding around 20.

Hours earlier at least two civilians were killed when a suicide truck bomb detonated at the gate of the police headquarters in lashkar Gah, the capital of volatile Helmand province.Afghan troops and police are battling the Taliban alone in the first “fighting season” since NATO ended its combat mission and left local forces to take charge of security.Tuesday’s violence came less than two days after 11 soldiers were killed in a Taliban ambush in the normally relatively peaceful western province of Herat. “It was a suicide car bomber targeting a convoy of foreign forces in Kabul,” interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said.