KABUL // A Taliban suicide bomber killed three people on an Afghan army bus in Kabul on Thursday.
It was the third such attack since the new government signed a deal for US troops to stay in the country beyond 2014.
On Wednesday, Taliban suicide bombers killed at least seven people in twin attacks on two buses carrying Afghan soldiers.
The militant group, which claimed responsibility for all three blasts, strongly opposes the US troop agreement that was signed on Tuesday, President Ashraf Ghani’s first day in office.
The deputy spokesman for the ministry of defence, Dawlat Waziri, confirmed the suicide attack killed three people and wounded eight.
After Wednesday’s blasts, the Taliban said they were sending “a clear message to the stooge government that signed the slave pact, and we will step up our attacks after this”.
The long-delayed security agreement between the US and Afghanistan allows about 10,000 US troops to stay in the country next year - it represented a major step towards mending frayed ties betweenboth countries.
The agreement was signed by Afghanistan’s new national unity government, which was formed under a US-brokered agreement to resolve months of disputes over who won the fraud-tainted presidential election.
Mr Ghani, who was declared the election winner, agreed to a power-sharing deal with his poll rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has taken up the new role of chief executive.
On Wednesday, the elusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar released his traditional Eid message to his followers.
It dismissed the elections as “a publicity stunt” and said that the US had “lost all possibilities to win” the war, but made no direct mention of the security pact or the new government.
Hamid Karzai, who stood down as president on Monday, had refused to sign the security deal, underlining rocky Afghan-US relations over recent years.
Nato’s follow-up mission, which will take over on January 1, will be made up of 9,800 US troops and about 3,000 soldiers from Germany, Italy and other member countries.
The Taliban have launched a series of recent offensives that have severely tested Afghan soldiers and police, as the US-led Nato combat operations prepare to leave the country at the end of the year.
The new mission – named Resolute Support – aims to help Afghan forces as they take on the militants, in parallel with US counter-terrorism operations.
* Agence France-Presse
