Afghan blast kills at least 27

A huge blast in Afghanistan’s eastern Logar province killed at least 27 people on Friday, a senior official said. The car bomb in the provincial capital of Pul-e Alam also injured 60 people, the head of Logar’s provincial council, Hasibullah Stanekzai, said.

A ministry of interior official and a spokesman for Logar’s governor confirmed the blast but did not comment on the number of casualties.

Rising attacks against Afghan army personnel

Deadly insider attacks against the Afghanistan army jumped in the first quarter of this year as the Taliban rebels took advantage of the coming American and NATO troop withdrawal, according to a US government report on Friday.

The quarterly report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said attacks on the Afghan security forces, mainly by the Taliban group, surged 37% over the January-March period from a year earlier.

But according to coalition figures, it said, 115 Afghan military personnel were killed and 39 wounded in 31 insider attacks in the first three months of this year.

But it made clear that the attacks threaten the stability of the Afghan government after the withdrawal of thousands of US troops and civilian defence contractors by September.

Al-Qaeda promises ‘war on all fronts’ with US

In an interview with CNN conducted through intermediaries, an al-Qaeda official said “war against the US will be continuing on all other fronts unless they are expelled from the rest of the Islamic world”.