Bombs kill 14 Afghan civilians, one US soldier

Bomb blasts in southern Afghanistan killed 14 Afghan civilians, including 11 members of one family, and a US soldier, officials said Thursday, in new attacks threatening elections next week.

In an increasingly violent north, Afghan security forces fought off Taliban in a battle an official said left eight militants and two policemen dead.

The surge in violence came as candidates for the August 20 presidential elections squeezed in more rallies ahead of the final day of campaigning on Tuesday, and election officials rushed through last-minute preparations.

The bombings happened on Wednesday in the violent south, a Taliban stronghold where thousands of Western troops have been battling to subdue multiple areas ahead of the elections, the second Afghan presidential ballot.

In the deadliest blast, a roadside bomb struck a minivan in Helmand province and killed a family of 11, said the police commander for the southern zone, General Ghulam Wahdat.

The dead were five sons, four daughters and both parents, he told AFP, blaming the blast on the Taliban.

"Only one little girl around six years old survived," added the provincial government spokesman Daud Ahmadi.

A roadside bomb in neighbouring Kandahar province killed three children as they were playing on Wednesday, police said.

"All the three children are boys between six and 11 years of age," said provincial police chief Mohammad Shah Khan.

Civilians bear the brunt of Afghanistan's Taliban-led insurgency, which has reached record proportions eight years after the 2001 US-led invasion overthrew their regime and installed a Western-backed administration.

The United Nations has said more than 1,000 civilians were killed during the conflict in the first six months of 2009, up almost a quarter over the same period last year.

Nearly 60 percent of civilian deaths were caused by insurgent attacks, most often bombings, and 30 percent by pro-government military forces, the UN said.

Thousands of troops are operating in several districts in a bid to make it safe for people to vote, but authorities are worried that Afghans will nonetheless not dare to go to polls, undermining the credibility of the ballot.

The Taliban have said they would not directly attack the elections but have called on Afghans to boycott the polls and instead join their "jihad", or holy war, for Afghanistan's "independence".

The US military announced meanwhile that one of its troops were killed in a roadside bomb in the south on Wednesday.

Nearly 30 international soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan so far this month, almost all of them in improvised explosive devices, or IEDs -- a favourite weapon of the militants.

US and British forces have been pressing a major offensive in the southern province of Helmand ahead of the presidential and provincial council elections.

About 4,000 of them deployed into insurgent strongholds in early July and were able to retake areas held by the extremists; another 400 pushed into a district in northeastern Helmand on Wednesday.

There are more than 100,000 international soldiers in Afghanistan, around two-thirds of them in the US military, with British and Canadian forces also playing a role in the south, the most dangerous battlefield.

Afghan security forces were also attacked overnight, with a clash in the northern province of Kunduz.

"In the fighting today, eight Taliban have been killed and 11 are wounded," provincial police chief Mohammad Raziq said.

"Two policemen have been martyred and three are wounded."

The clash was in Archi district, where insurgents killed the police chief two days ago.

The violence threatens to undermine the elections, with authorities saying that voting was unlikely in nine of 365 districts, most of them in the south, because insecurity had prevented them from working there.