Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — A powerful truck bomb killed at least 25 people today, more than half of them schoolchildren, in a province just south of Kabul. Authorities speculated that the explosives-laden vehicle might have been intended for use in an attack in the capital.
In Afghanistan's volatile south, meanwhile, two American troops were killed in a roadside bomb, the U.S. military said.
The incidents followed a pattern of escalating violence in widely scattered areas of Afghanistan -- in east and west, north and south.
The truck blast took place in Logar province, in the country's center.
The vehicle, traveling on Afghanistan's main north-south highway, apparently ran off the road and overturned before dawn. When police and civilians approached after daybreak and tried to right the truck, it blew up, the Interior Ministry said.
Most of the dead were civilians, including at least 13 students from a nearby primary school, local officials said. The thunderous blast left a huge crater in the highway, hurled debris over a wide area and collapsed several nearby shops and homes.
The truck was piled high with a load of timber, with the payload of explosives buried underneath, police said. Officials were trying to determine if it was triggered remotely when police and other help arrived or if it detonated when the truck was moved.
Kabul itself has been relatively calm lately, but an explosion of this size and strength in a crowded area would likely have caused many more deaths and injuries. The scene of the blast was a rural district, relatively thinly populated.
Over the past year, Logar province gradually became a hotbed of insurgent activity, alarming Western military officials and fostering the impression that the Taliban were tightening a noose around Kabul. Travelers on the main road south out of the capital faced constant danger of ambush, abduction or banditry when passing through the province.
In an effort to weaken militants' grip on the area, U.S. troops from the 10th Mountain Division, based in Fort Drum, N.Y., have been deployed in Logar and adjoining Wardak province for about six months. In addition, a "village guards" initiative has been set up in the two provinces, which Afghan and Western authorities say eventually may be expanded countrywide.
Under it, locals work as a kind of auxiliary police force to try to keep the insurgents from overrunning remote villages.
