Afghan foreign troop toll for 2010 hits 700

Taliban insurgents launched attacks in Kabul and a major northern city on Sunday as the 2010 death toll for foreign troops climbed to 700, nearly a third of the total killed in nearly a decade of war.

Two militants wearing suicide vests attacked a bus carrying Afghan army officers in Kabul, killing five and wounding nine, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assault, the first major attack in the Afghan capital since May, when six foreign troops were killed by a large suicide car bomb.

In the north, seven Afghan soldiers and police were killed when at least four suicide bombers entered an army recruitment centre in the city of Kunduz, visited a day earlier by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Defence Ministry said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a statement the attacks were a "major and unforgiving crime...(by) Afghanistan's enemies opposing the strengthening of the Afghan security forces".

Afghan forces make an easier target than better-equipped foreign troops, who are usually inside tightly guarded compounds or heavily armoured vehicles. But with both NATO and Karzai keen to build up domestic forces to speed the departure of foreign troops, they are also a strategic target for insurgents. In Kabul, insurgents wearing explosive vests opened fire on a bus carrying the officers on the main Jalalabad road, the site of NATO and Afghan army bases and several similar attacks. Reuters