Roadside bomb kills local officials in Afghanistan

KHOST, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A roadside bomb killed two regional officials in a remote part of Afghanistan on Saturday, the latest insurgent attack on local government targets, a regional police chief said.
Afghanistan has seen a dramatic rise of violence this year as 100,000 Western troops, two-thirds of them American, battle to contain an increasingly fierce Taliban insurgency.
The latest attack occurred in the Shah Khil district of the southeastern Paktika province when a roadside bomb hit a car carrying two local officials.
“The district police chief and district governor were travelling in a vehicle when a roadside bomb killed both of them,” Wali Khan Zadran, Paktika’s police chief, told Reuters.
Homemade bombs are frequently used by insurgents in their campaign against the Afghan government and its Western backers.
Growing violence in Afghanistan in a concern to Washington particularly after the White House was presented intelligence estimating that Taliban-led forces battling U.S. troops have nearly quadrupled since 2006.
U.S. President Barack Obama has launched a broad review of his Afghan war strategy after the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, gave him a grim assessment of the war and called for more troops.
(Reporting by Kamaal Sadaat; Writing by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Maria Golovnina)