KABUL, Afghanistan — Fourteen people, 10 of them foreigners, were killed by a suicide bomber on Tuesday, bringing to at least 28 the number of deaths attributed to unrest sweeping the Muslim world as a result of an amateurish video parodying the Prophet Muhammad.
A spokesman for an Afghan insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, claimed responsibility for the bombing and said it was carried out by an 18-year-old woman.
“We claim credit for the attack by a martyrdom-seeking mujahid, an 18-year-old girl named Fatima, from Kabul, and the attack has been conducted in response to the film insulting the Prophet Muhammad and Islam,” said Zubir Siddiqi, a spokesman for the group, who was reached by telephone.
The attack took place as word emerged that the American-led military coalition fighting the insurgents has sharply curtailed ground-level operations with the Afghan Army and police forces, potentially undercutting the training mission that is the heart of the Western exit strategy.
The new limits, which were issued Sunday and require a general’s approval for any joint work at the small-unit level, was prompted by a spike in attacks on international troops by Afghan soldiers and police over the past six weeks. There was also fear that anger over the anti-Islam video could prompt more of what the coalition calls insider attacks, American officials said. The deaths in Kabul on Tuesday were the first here so far connected to the video, as authorities cracked down on attempted street demonstrations, and blocked Internet access to all Google products, including YouTube, where the video was posted under the name "Innocence of Muslims." In Egypt, a radical cleric issued a fatwa calling for the killing of everyone involved in the video, according to a report posted on militants’ Web sites.
In the bombing on Tuesday, a suicide bomber, said by insurgents to be a woman, drove a car full of explosives head-on into a minibus apparently carrying foreign workers on the Airport Road early Tuesday morning, killing all 12 people aboard and two people on the road, according to police.
Literature seen in the wreckage of the minibus suggested they had been part of a flight crew, but their nationalities remained unclear.
At least eight of the victims were employed by a South African aviation charter company called ACS/Balmoral, a company spokeswoman said. All are believed to be South African citizens, according to the spokeswoman, Candice Teubes.
Authorities in Afghanistan had conflicting accounts. An aide to Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, the police chief of Kabul, said at least six of the 10 dead foreigners were South Africans, five men and a woman; one was a Filipino, and the others’ nationalities were uncertain.
Spokesmen for the French and Russian embassies say they did not believe any of the victims were from their countries, contradicting earlier police accounts that the dead included French and Russian citizens. The attack in Afghanistan brought to at least 28 the number of people killed in six countries as a consequence of protests over the video since it came to public attention and was posted on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11. A Florida pastor, Terry Jones, whose small church had publicly staged burnings of the Koran last year, called attention to it in the United States, but it drew much wider attention in the Muslim world after an Arabic language version began to circulate on the Web.
The film was produced in the United States, though its origins are still shrouded, Muslims have depicted it as deeply insulting, it is protected by American freedom of expression laws. American federal authorities identified the man behind the film as a convicted criminal named Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, 55, and took him in for questioning on Sept. 15 over possible federal parole violations, that has so far done little to tamp down the rising unrest.
The violent backlash began on Sept. 11 with an organized attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that claimed the lives of the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three staff members. Protests at Western diplomatic posts in the ensuing days took one life in Egypt, three in Tunisia, one in Lebanon and five in Yemen. United States Marines were sent to Yemen and Sudan to protect the embassies in those countries.
SITE Intelligence Group, a monitoring agency that tracks militants’ Internet postings, reported late Monday that a prominent Egyptian Salafist preacher named Ahmad Ashoush had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying that “the killing of the director, producer, actors and everyone else involved in the film is mandatory.”
The fatwa by Mr. Ashoush, who has been reported as having ties to Al Qaeda, was posted on militant online forums on Sept. 16, SITE said.
Afghanistan had remained relatively calm while unrest swept Muslim communities from Australia to Britain, and the suicide bombing were the first deaths in Afghanistan linked to the video, which most people here have not been able to see.
Authorities in Pakistan similarly blocked access to YouTube, officials said, as did some other Muslim countries. Google, which owns YouTube, refused a White House request to remove the video, saying it did not violate Google’s rules on hate speech.
French soldiers could be seen at the site of the blast afterward. At least nine bodies, some with severed limbs, were seen lying on the road. It appeared that the dead were Westerners, judging from their clothes — T-shirts and jeans — and their remains. One victim’s blond hair was somehow untouched by the blast, which left a crater almost four feet across and a foot deep.
“A Toyota Corolla rigged as a car bomb was detonated by one of its occupants near a minibus that was carrying passengers,” said the Kabul police chief, Mohammed Ayub Salangi.
Suicide bombings carried out by women are highly unusual in Afghanistan.
Mr. Siddiqi spoke for the extremist branch of Hezb-i-Islami, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, which fights against both the Taliban and the Afghan government. A moderate branch of the group has prominent members in the government, and Hezb-i-Islami has been seen as the insurgent group most likely to enter peace talks with the government.
The explosion Tuesday took place on a road leading from the civilian entrance to the airport toward northern Kabul, near three adjacent wedding halls. The victims’ vehicle appeared to have been heading toward the airport. Kabul police officers, Afghan intelligence special forces and some Westerners in plain clothes rushed to the scene, but no one arrived in the first hour and a half after the blast to claim the bodies or identify them.
A witness, a street vendor named Abdul Rahim, 40, who was 150 yards from the scene, said he saw the car with the bomb drive head on into the minibus on a narrow access lane that was part of the Airport Road, a broad boulevard where the lanes are separated by concrete barriers. As the vehicles collided, the bomb went off with such force that both were flung into the air, ending up 100 yards away from one another, he said.
The minibus was thrown into the forecourt of a gasoline station, and all 12 occupants were killed, police said. Gen. Mohammad Zahir, the head of the Afghan Police Criminal Investigation Division, said it was unclear who the victims worked for. One of the dead was a woman, he said, adding that 10 other people were wounded.
Alissa J. Rubin and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Scott Sayare from Paris.
A spokesman for an Afghan insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, claimed responsibility for the bombing and said it was carried out by an 18-year-old woman.
“We claim credit for the attack by a martyrdom-seeking mujahid, an 18-year-old girl named Fatima, from Kabul, and the attack has been conducted in response to the film insulting the Prophet Muhammad and Islam,” said Zubir Siddiqi, a spokesman for the group, who was reached by telephone.
The attack took place as word emerged that the American-led military coalition fighting the insurgents has sharply curtailed ground-level operations with the Afghan Army and police forces, potentially undercutting the training mission that is the heart of the Western exit strategy.
The new limits, which were issued Sunday and require a general’s approval for any joint work at the small-unit level, was prompted by a spike in attacks on international troops by Afghan soldiers and police over the past six weeks. There was also fear that anger over the anti-Islam video could prompt more of what the coalition calls insider attacks, American officials said. The deaths in Kabul on Tuesday were the first here so far connected to the video, as authorities cracked down on attempted street demonstrations, and blocked Internet access to all Google products, including YouTube, where the video was posted under the name "Innocence of Muslims." In Egypt, a radical cleric issued a fatwa calling for the killing of everyone involved in the video, according to a report posted on militants’ Web sites.
In the bombing on Tuesday, a suicide bomber, said by insurgents to be a woman, drove a car full of explosives head-on into a minibus apparently carrying foreign workers on the Airport Road early Tuesday morning, killing all 12 people aboard and two people on the road, according to police.
Literature seen in the wreckage of the minibus suggested they had been part of a flight crew, but their nationalities remained unclear.
At least eight of the victims were employed by a South African aviation charter company called ACS/Balmoral, a company spokeswoman said. All are believed to be South African citizens, according to the spokeswoman, Candice Teubes.
Authorities in Afghanistan had conflicting accounts. An aide to Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, the police chief of Kabul, said at least six of the 10 dead foreigners were South Africans, five men and a woman; one was a Filipino, and the others’ nationalities were uncertain.
Spokesmen for the French and Russian embassies say they did not believe any of the victims were from their countries, contradicting earlier police accounts that the dead included French and Russian citizens. The attack in Afghanistan brought to at least 28 the number of people killed in six countries as a consequence of protests over the video since it came to public attention and was posted on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11. A Florida pastor, Terry Jones, whose small church had publicly staged burnings of the Koran last year, called attention to it in the United States, but it drew much wider attention in the Muslim world after an Arabic language version began to circulate on the Web.
The film was produced in the United States, though its origins are still shrouded, Muslims have depicted it as deeply insulting, it is protected by American freedom of expression laws. American federal authorities identified the man behind the film as a convicted criminal named Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, 55, and took him in for questioning on Sept. 15 over possible federal parole violations, that has so far done little to tamp down the rising unrest.
The violent backlash began on Sept. 11 with an organized attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that claimed the lives of the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three staff members. Protests at Western diplomatic posts in the ensuing days took one life in Egypt, three in Tunisia, one in Lebanon and five in Yemen. United States Marines were sent to Yemen and Sudan to protect the embassies in those countries.
SITE Intelligence Group, a monitoring agency that tracks militants’ Internet postings, reported late Monday that a prominent Egyptian Salafist preacher named Ahmad Ashoush had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying that “the killing of the director, producer, actors and everyone else involved in the film is mandatory.”
The fatwa by Mr. Ashoush, who has been reported as having ties to Al Qaeda, was posted on militant online forums on Sept. 16, SITE said.
Afghanistan had remained relatively calm while unrest swept Muslim communities from Australia to Britain, and the suicide bombing were the first deaths in Afghanistan linked to the video, which most people here have not been able to see.
Authorities in Pakistan similarly blocked access to YouTube, officials said, as did some other Muslim countries. Google, which owns YouTube, refused a White House request to remove the video, saying it did not violate Google’s rules on hate speech.
French soldiers could be seen at the site of the blast afterward. At least nine bodies, some with severed limbs, were seen lying on the road. It appeared that the dead were Westerners, judging from their clothes — T-shirts and jeans — and their remains. One victim’s blond hair was somehow untouched by the blast, which left a crater almost four feet across and a foot deep.
“A Toyota Corolla rigged as a car bomb was detonated by one of its occupants near a minibus that was carrying passengers,” said the Kabul police chief, Mohammed Ayub Salangi.
Suicide bombings carried out by women are highly unusual in Afghanistan.
Mr. Siddiqi spoke for the extremist branch of Hezb-i-Islami, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, which fights against both the Taliban and the Afghan government. A moderate branch of the group has prominent members in the government, and Hezb-i-Islami has been seen as the insurgent group most likely to enter peace talks with the government.
The explosion Tuesday took place on a road leading from the civilian entrance to the airport toward northern Kabul, near three adjacent wedding halls. The victims’ vehicle appeared to have been heading toward the airport. Kabul police officers, Afghan intelligence special forces and some Westerners in plain clothes rushed to the scene, but no one arrived in the first hour and a half after the blast to claim the bodies or identify them.
A witness, a street vendor named Abdul Rahim, 40, who was 150 yards from the scene, said he saw the car with the bomb drive head on into the minibus on a narrow access lane that was part of the Airport Road, a broad boulevard where the lanes are separated by concrete barriers. As the vehicles collided, the bomb went off with such force that both were flung into the air, ending up 100 yards away from one another, he said.
The minibus was thrown into the forecourt of a gasoline station, and all 12 occupants were killed, police said. Gen. Mohammad Zahir, the head of the Afghan Police Criminal Investigation Division, said it was unclear who the victims worked for. One of the dead was a woman, he said, adding that 10 other people were wounded.
Alissa J. Rubin and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul, and Scott Sayare from Paris.