KANDAHAR: A Taliban suicide bomber killed five people and wounded dozens of others, mainly children as young as five, after detonating a car packed with explosives at a police headquarters in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday.

It was the militants’ first major attack since US President Donald Trump announced in Washington late on Monday that he was committing American troops to the war-torn country indefinitely.

“A suicide bomber detonated an explosive-filled car in a parking lot near the main police headquarters in Lashkar Gah,” Omar Zhwak, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand province, said.

“Our initial information shows that five civilians were killed and 25 were wounded, including women and children,” he added.

The car park was full of people lining up to get into the police headquarters when the explosion happened, said Zhwak.

The attack occurred at 8am when officials would have been arriving for work and civilians were preparing to lodge inquiries.

Zhwak added that a nearby mosque, which was being used as a seminary, had been damaged. Children — aged between five and 12, according to police — were studying there at the time.

Hospital staff gave a higher figure for wounded. “We have received 38 wounded — mostly schoolchildren — and five dead, including two women and two soldiers,” Mauladad Tabihdad, director of hospitals in Helmand, said.

Photos posted on Twitter by Afghan media outlets showed damaged Afghan military Humvee vehicles, including one apparently thrown into a drain by the force of the explosion.

“The car bomb targeted a number of army vehicles parked in the parking lot.

“We have reports of some casualties to army soldiers,” Salam Afghan, a police spokesman, said.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2017