Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up at the entrance of a Kabul guesthouse Tuesday, killing two drivers, hours after a UN study announced the highest civilian casualty figures in the Afghan war.
Two bombers struck near a villa used by Western private security company Hart, killing civilian drivers for the contractor, according to the head of police criminal investigations in the Afghan capital.
"There were two suicide bombers who detonated themselves at the entrance. Two drivers were killed and a security guard was injured," police chief Sayed Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada told reporters.
The UN report said civilian casualties had risen by a third in the first six months of 2010 with insurgents killing seven times more civilians than NATO-led troops.
"We are very concerned about the future because the human cost of this conflict is unfortunately being paid too heavily by the civilian Afghans," UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura told a news conference in Kabul.
"Afghan children and women are increasingly bearing the brunt of this conflict. They are being killed and injured in their homes and communities in greater numbers than ever before," De Mistura said.
The attack came as President Hamid Karzai's spokesman said all international and domestic private security firms would be dissolved in a bid to transfer capacity to the weaker Afghan police and army.
Eyewitness Abdul Sami, a guard for London-based Hart, said the suicide bombers had shot dead two drivers before approaching the house, and then kicked and shot at the gate, leaving a guard with a bullet wound in the leg.
"When they saw the door would not open they came from the other side, from the back of the building. There they detonated," Sami said.
American and British soldiers, as well as Afghan police, deployed to the scene.
An AFP reporter saw three bullet-riddled near the building, where the gates had been blown away. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in the city's Taimani residential area.
Insurgents have increasingly targeted guesthouses in the heavily fortified capital.
Karzai's spokesman Waheed Omer told reporters that the government was serious about its intention to dissolve private security companies (PSCs).
"One of the reasons that the Afghan police force training is slow is because of the existence of the private security companies, because there has been more investment in them," he said.
Omer said security firms employ 30-40,000 armed personnel throughout Afghanistan.
He said Karzai had spoken to his Western backers as well as leaders of the US and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) who hire the companies to safeguard many aspects of their work, including supply convoys.
ISAF spokesman Brigadier-General Josef Blotz said the plan was a good one but could only happen when national security forces were strong enough to take on the role of the PSCs.
"Over time, as the security forces are being built up, we can get rid of the private security companies," said Blotz.
Omer said the dissolution would be planned carefully to ensure no security vacuum.
"We're looking at how we can get these people within the Afghan national army or national police," he said, adding that the international community must help with the transition.
"This is a programme that will be executed at any cost," he said.
Rob Gordon of Tor International, a PSC working in Afghanistan, said there was a lot of uncertainty about when the plans would be realised.
"This has been talked about and nothing's come of it. At the moment most organisations are just waiting to see what happens," said Gordon.
The White House meanwhile condemned Tuesday last week's killings of 10 civilian aid workers in Afghanistan, including six Americans, as a "brutal, senseless attack."
The bullet-ridden bodies of five American men, two Afghan men, and three women -- an American, a German and a Briton -- were found in the northeastern province of Badakhshan on Friday. The Taliban claimed responsibility.
"It was a brutal and senseless attack," White House spokesman Bill Burton said. "And it's because of those sorts of attacks that the Taliban doesn't have a widespread support."
The Taliban, overthrown in a 2001 US-led invasion, control large swathes of the south and have put up stiff resistance to the deployment of 150,000 US and NATO troops as part of international efforts to end the near nine-year war.
Copyright 2010 AFP South Asian Edition
