At least four people have been killed and dozens of others wounded after a bomb-laden car exploded near a heavily fortified foreign compound in the Afghan capital Kabul.
Afghan Interior Ministry officials said casualties took place after militants targeted Green Village, located near a busy road in the east of the city, on Monday evening.
So far, four people have been confirmed dead and more than 90 wounded, including 23 children, the ministry deputy spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said. Three of the dead were members of the security forces and one was a civilian.
Rahimi said there were fears the toll could rise.
Interior Ministry spokesman Najib Danish earlier said that "special police forces' units have been deployed to the site to check if there are more attackers."
Until recently, some UN staff had lived and worked at the highly secure compound, but Danish said the area was now largely empty and "only a number of guards" were left.
The militants have stepped up attacks on foreign targets across the war-torn country over the past months.
In late November, a vehicle bomb exploded outside the compound of British security firm G4S, killing at least 10 people. The Taliban claimed the attack. That was followed by a bomb and gun attack on a government compound in Kabul on December 24 that killed at least 43 people.
PressTV-Attack on British security company in Kabul kills 10
The car bomb struck a compound which houses G4S, a private British security company, in east Kabul.
The developments come as the Kabul government has stepped up efforts to convince the Taliban to end more than 17 years of militancy amid Washington’s failures on the battleground.
The US, too, has been holding talks with the Taliban. The US State Department's special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, has said that he had held "productive" meetings in Abu Dhabi with Afghan and international partners "to promote intra-Afghan dialogue towards ending the conflict."
Khalilzad said the Taliban seek an agreement on the withdrawal of foreign forces, while the US wants assurances from the militant group that its forces would not be attacked.
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The talks are the latest in a flurry of diplomatic efforts aimed at putting an end to the war in Afghanistan, which began with the US-led invasion in 2001.
US President Donald Trump has ordered the start of withdrawing some 7,000 troops from Afghanistan, about half of the total number of American boots on the ground in the war-torn country.
Taliban militants have pledged to step up their attacks unless US forces fully withdraw from Afghanistan.Source: presstv.com
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