Bomb explodes along road, killing children and extending wave of

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A bomb attached to a bicycle killed at least 13 people, most of them children, on a road regularly used by U.S. troops in this southern city Tuesday, underlining the violence still plaguing Afghanistan two years after the fall of the Taliban.

More than 50 people were wounded in the blast, which officials said may have been targeting U.S. troops or the provincial governor, whose motorcade was about to pass that way.

An Associated Press reporter saw wrecked bicycles, blood and shattered glass from a passing truck strewn across the street in the east of the city, which was quickly sealed off by dozens of Afghan and U.S. soldiers.

Eleven of the dead were children, aged 7-15, apparently among a crowd that gathered after another bomb went off at the same site a few minutes earlier.

"I was playing football when I heard the first bomb, and a lot us rushed to see what happened. Then the second one went off," said Saami Khan, 15, who had been struck by shrapnel in the face and chest and was recuperating in a Kandahar hospital.

Deputy Police Chief Salim Khan suggested the twin blasts may have been intended for soldiers from an Afghan military base just 100 yards away.

"They were chasing a suspect when they second explosion occurred," he said.

But Deputy Interior Minister Hilalludin Hillal said the U.S. troops who regularly travel the road or Kandahar Governor Yusuf Pashtun were more likely targets of the attackers. "They don't care so much about Afghan troops," he said.

A soldier, Amanullah Popolzai, said authorities arrested a man seen running from the scene shortly before the explosion. The man, who appeared to be an Afghan, was caught trying to hide in a nearby home.

"This was the work of the Taliban. The man looked like he was a Talib fighter," Popolzai said.

In the capital, Kabul, President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack as "barbarism."

"These enemies of Afghanistan, who hide in the darkness to launch attacks on innocent civilians, must be eliminated, and they will be eliminated," said his spokesman, Jawid Luddin.

Khan said the truck driver and a male passer-by were also killed by the bomb, which he said was attached to one of the bicycles. Khan put the number of wounded at 23, although Luddin put that total at more than 50.

"Most of them were children who had just come out of school," Luddin told the AP. "It's an act of barbarism."

Southern and eastern Afghanistan have been plagued by shootings, kidnappings and bombings against civilians as well as soldiers, many of them claimed by the Taliban.

The violence threatens the timetable for national elections scheduled for the summer, and has all but halted badly needed rebuilding across a huge swath of the country along the Pakistani border.

Kandahar, the focus of an ambitious U.S. plan to deploy hundreds of troops and reconstruction workers before the vote, has seen several attacks.

On Monday night, gunmen attacked the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Kandahar, throwing a grenade and firing shots but causing no injuries.

A bomb ripped through a bustling bazaar in the city a month ago, wounding 20 Afghans.

On Dec. 3, two U.S. soldiers were wounded when a suspected member of the Taliban threw a grenade at their parked vehicle in a Kandahar square.

The latest bombing comes two days after a constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, meeting in Kabul ratified a charter supposed to underpin a new state strong enough to put an end to a quarter- century of fighting.

The three-week convention was marred by an ugly ethnic split, complicating U.N. efforts to disarm regional warlords, who frequently fight each other, in order to ensure the voting is fair.

In the latest factional fighting police said a senior commander in Zabul province, just to the northeast of Kandahar, was shot and killed Monday by security forces loyal to the governor.

The United States is training a new Afghan National Army to curb the warlords. But only about 7,000 soldiers -- out of an eventual force of 70,000 -- have been deployed.

The 11,000-strong American military force still depends heavily on local militias as it pursues Taliban and al-Qaida guerrillas in the south and east.

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