KABUL, Afghanistan • A series of attacks by insurgents in recent days has killed numerous civilians but for the most part failed against military targets.
As many as 24 civilians were killed and eight wounded Thursday morning when two mines planted on a road in western Herat province exploded, Afghan officials said.
Also Thursday, a suicide bomber in a car filled with explosives tried to break through the gates of Forward Operating Base Gardez in eastern Paktia province, but it exploded before entering, killing two Afghan security guards and wounding nine civilian laborers, apparently as they arrived for work.
The Taliban said the suicide bomber was a 70-year-old man and claimed that the blast killed 27 foreign soldiers on the largely U.S. base, but a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said there were no reports of coalition casualties there.
The attacks reflect a growing trend over the past two years in which the great majority of civilian casualties have been caused by the Taliban and their allied insurgent groups. The United Nations in Afghanistan said in its June report to the secretary general that 80 percent of civilian casualties were caused by "anti-government elements."
In the Herat attacks, the two mines exploded on the same road at about the same time, but in different villages in Obe District, said Mohiuddin Noori, the spokesman for the provincial governor. He said that the attacks took place in an area frequented by Taliban but with no coalition forces present, and that they were apparently aimed at civilians.
The victims in both cases had been on their way to a local market town to buy provisions, Noori said, and both vehicles were full of civilian shoppers. In an explosion involving a truck, eight people were wounded and one woman died on the way to a hospital. In the second blast, the bomb hit a packed minibus and all 22 people on board were killed, he said.
A statement released later by the Ministry of the Interior put the death toll at 24, including five women, and the wounded at 11, including seven children under age 5.
Late Sunday night, three Taliban suicide bombers, one of them driving a van full of explosives, attacked a fuel depot in Kandahar province, killing four Afghan security guards and wounding eight others, three of them Nepalese contract workers. They failed, however, to enter the fortified compound.
On Wednesday, in Oruzgan province in the south, a motorcycle packed with explosives was left in a market in the Dehrawout district and detonated as shoppers gathered to buy food for the evening meal breaking the daily Ramadan fast. Ahmad Milad Mudasir, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said five civilians were killed, two of them young boys, and 18 were wounded.
"In the area where the explosion occurred, there were no police or other officials," Mudasir said. "We don't know what their specific targets were, but the victims were all civilians."
Also Wednesday afternoon, in southern Helmand province, two civilians were killed by a roadside bomb, according to the provincial police chief. The victims were farmers who were taking grapes to the marketplace, he said.
On Tuesday morning, gunmen on two motorcycles shot and killed a 22-year-old woman, Rabia Sadat, as she headed for work at a rural development project. Shahida Husain, a member of the High Peace Council from Kandahar, said Sadat worked in the government job to support her family.
"This kind of killing really affects the female gender in Kandahar and actually stops women from working outside their homes," she said. "Women in Kandahar really live in a state of fear, and I wonder how girls still attend schools and their parents even let them."
