Afghan bus blast kills 15 as guerrilla attacks grow

Fifteen people were killed yesterday, nearly half of them believed to be children, when a bomb wrecked a mini-bus in the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand amid suspicions that it exploded while being transported by anti-government guerrillas.

Helmand's deputy governor, Haji Pir Mohammed, blamed fighters from al-Qa'ida and the Taliban, two days after Nato took command of the 5,000 international peacekeeping forces patrolling the streets of the capital city, Kabul.

Mr Mohammed suggested the device had gone off accidentally, and may have been intended for an attack on next week's independence celebrations in Lashkargah, the provincial capital 20 miles from the blast scene. He said six of the dead were children, and one was a woman. "They are killing innocent people," he added.

In Kabul, two university students died yesterday when a bomb blew up in a house; police said they were making the device for use in an attack. The capital has long been regarded as an island of relative calm and is the only area over which the Washington-backed interim Afghan government can claim unquestioned control.

For months there have been almost daily guerrilla attacks in Afghanistan, despite numerous, highly costly military operations launched against the insurgents by the Americans. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, is still at large and apparently issuing announcements denouncing Western charities from his hideout. Attacks against the Afghan government's sparse array of troops, and also international aid agency workers, are intensifying. US Army positions are coming under rocket-fire almost every day, albeit usually to little effect.

Christian Aid, supported by several other international charities, has warned that the security situation in Afghan-istan has shown "a marked deterioration", saying "radical elements" are trying to undermine the transitional government and the international reconstruction process.

It said local power struggles, fuelled in some areas by the opium trade, are further fragmenting the country. Twenty five people were killed in central Afghanistan yesterday when fighting erupted between forces of a sacked provincial official and his successor.

International agencies in Afghanistan are pressing hard for the Nato-led peace-keepers' remit to be enlarged into the countryside, which is blighted by competing warlords, violence and instability; a move Nato officials have indicated the alliance may eventually consider. Yesterday's death toll was among the highest for some time. No one claimed responsibility for the bus bomb.

The apparently resurgent Taliban are among an assortment of militiamen conducting persistent and worsening attacks in an effort to undermine the Washington-backed transitional government of Hamid Karzai, drive out the 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan, and disrupt the activities of Western aid agencies.

Last week, six government soldiers and an aid driver were killed, also in Helmand; guerrillas also claimed to have killed five pro-government troops in Kandahar province.