.gif)
Two US soldiers and five Afghans were killed in bomb blasts in Afghanistan on Wednesday, as the UN reported the deadliest year yet for war-weary civilians caught in a spiralling Taliban-led insurgency.
Also Wednesday, a suicide truck bomb rocked a southern Afghan town, injuring several people, a day after at least nine people died in violence at a protest against an alleged desecration of the Koran by foreign forces, police said.
The two US soldiers assigned to the NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were killed in a home-made bomb explosion in eastern Afghanistan, the force said, without giving the exact location.
"Two ISAF service members from the United States were killed today as a result of an IED (improvised explosive device) strike in eastern Afghanistan," the force said in a statement.
The deaths took to 17 the number of foreign forces killed in Afghanistan since the start of the year, according to an AFP tally based on that kept by the independent icasualties.org website.
Four Afghan military engineers and a civilian were killed, meanwhile, when a bomb device they were trying to defuse went off in the eastern province of Khost, said Zahir Wardak, a senior military official.
In southern Kandahar province, a hub of Taliban activity, a militant detonated a truck bomb near government installations in Daman district, injuring three police and as many civilians, the interior ministry said.
The bomber apparently tried to enter the district headquarters "but failed for some reason and instead exploded outside the gate," Sardar Mohammad Zazai, the Kandahar provincial police chief, told AFP.
Civilians are increasingly being caught in the crossfire of the Afghan war, the United Nations said in a report on Wednesday, with 2,412 killed in 2009, the highest toll since the US-led invasion in late 2001.
This is up 14 percent from the 2,118 civilians who died in 2008, and the vast majority of the dead were killed in Taliban attacks, the UN's Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in its report.
UNAMA's head of human rights Norah Niland said 67 percent of last year's civilian deaths, or 1,630, were in insurgent attacks, while pro-government forces including NATO and US troops were responsible for 25 percent, or 596 civilian deaths.
The deadliest months were August, with 333 deaths, and September, with 336, she told reporters.
"The good news is that, in part, the number of casualties is not keeping pace (with) warfare incidents," Niland said, referring to an escalation in fighting as the insurgency has spread its shadow across the country.
NATO had "reduced the number of air strikes in residential areas and the figures of casualties as a result of air strikes has come down significantly," she said.
But an influx of foreign troops over the course of 2010, as a new counter-insurgency strategy takes hold, meant "much more warfare and that's bad news for Afghan civilians," Niland said.
Civilian casualties are a source of tension between the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and the international forces fighting the insurgency.
Karzai uses the issue to press home his authority, draw support for his unpopular government while criticising the tactics of the foreign forces.
The report's release comes a day after at least nine people were reported killed in a protest in southern Helmand province's Garmsir district.
Violence erupted on Tuesday over rumours that NATO-led forces had defiled a copy of the Koran during a military operation.
"Eight protesters were killed when the protesters attacked national security officials in Garmsir," deputy provincial police chief Kamaluddin Khan told AFP.
The shooting of the protesters occurred after an Afghan guard outside a nearby building was killed by gunfire "from the demonstrators' side," he said.
NATO said it had no information confirming the civilian deaths, but that it was investigating the incident along with Afghan security officials.
The force, however, said it shot dead an "insurgent sniper" who shot an Afghan official on the military base at the time.
The US and NATO have 113,000 troops leading the fight against the Taliban, with another 40,000 being deployed over the course of this year.
