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Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the UN mission in the country on Monday strongly condemned two bomb attacks in eastern provinces which claimed the lives of 20 people, including 12 children, earlier in the day.
Ten schoolchildren, two U.S. soldiers of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) and an Afghan Local Police (ALP) member were killed when a suicide bomber blew his explosive-laden motorcycle up in Samkani district, eastern Paktia province, 100 km south of capital Kabul.
The bloody attack took place in front of a boys' school at around 10:50 a.m. local time and the obvious target of the attack was an ISAF convoy passing by, provincial officials said. Up to 15 children and an ALP cop were also wounded in the blast.
"The enemies of the people of Afghanistan once again shed the blood of our innocent and oppressed people, particularly school children and women, to achieve foreign objectives," Karzai said in a statement.
Afghan and ISAF officials use the term "enemies of Afghanistan" for referring to Taliban insurgent group.
Earlier on Monday morning, a family of seven was killed and two people were wounded when a vehicle touched off an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in eastern Laghman province.
The incident happened at about 7:00 a.m. in Hakim Abad area in outskirts of provincial capital Mehtarlam city, 90 km east of Kabul.The deaths included four women, two children and a man.The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group launched an annual rebel offensive late April against Afghan forces and about 100,000 ISAF troops stationed in the country.
"These attacks resulted in a high number of civilian casualties, with minimal impact on their purported military targetsany such violence is unacceptable, but especially when it involves civilians and even more so when it involves children," said the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative Jan Kubis in a statement.
"Any attacks which deliberately take place near a school can only be condemned for the heinous attacks that they are," said Kubis who is also the head of UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).
"In the past two weeks, conflict-related violence has killed 125 Afghan civilians and injured 287, a 24 percent increase in total civilian casualties from the same period in 2012. Anti- government elements were responsible for 84 per cent of all civilian casualties during this two-week period," the UN statement noted.
"The UNAMA stresses once again that the use of suicide attacks and IEDs against civilians must stop. It notes that the indiscriminate use of such attacks is in contravention of humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes."
"The International Security Assistance Force strongly condemns the senseless and deadly attacks in Paktia and Laghman today, which claimed the lives of many Afghan civilians," the ISAF said in a press statement issued here.
The Afghan president also directed the concerned authorities to provide best medical facilities to the injured.
