KABUL — A wave of bombings killed at least 54 people in Afghanistan and Iraq on Sunday, authorities said.
A suicide car bombing near a US military base in eastern Afghanistan that once hosted CIA employees killed at least 25 civilians, local officials said, the latest insurgent attack after foreign forces ended their combat mission there.
In Iraq, a series of bombings across the capital, Baghdad, killed at least 29 people and wounded 81, police officials said.
The Afghanistan bombing hit a checkpoint monitored by members of the Khost Provincial Force, an Afghan unit that guards Camp Chapman for the American forces there, said Youqib Khan, the deputy police chief in Khost province.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the bomber was trying to get onto the base or what led to his attack, Khan said.
A local hospital received the bodies of the civilians, most of whom were women and children, said Dr. Hedayatullah Hamedi, the province’s health director.
“The explosion was so loud and strong that almost all of the city of Khost was shaken by the blast,” provincial police chief General Faizullah Ghyrat said.
The suicide bomber carried out his attack when many civilian vehicles were waiting to pass by on a main road, said an Afghan police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to discuss the attack. He said the women and children killed and wounded were in vehicles waiting for their turn to pass.
Foreign and Afghan forces blocked journalists and police from accessing the site after the blast. Pentagon officials referred comment to NATO authorities in Afghanistan. In a statement, NATO said “no US or coalition personnel were injured as a result of the attack,” without elaborating.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast,
Camp Chapman, named after the first US soldier killed in combat in the war in Afghanistan, is near Forward Operating Base Salerno, a large Soviet-built airfield that was targeted by a Taliban truck bombing in June 2012.
Camp Chapman was the site where seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed in a Pakistani Taliban suicide bombing in December 2009. Six more agency personnel were wounded in what was considered the most lethal attack on the CIA since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001 and possibly since the 1983 embassy bombing in Beirut.
It’s not clear whether the CIA still operates out of Camp Chapman.
In a separate development Sunday, Afghan security officials said a pair of roadside bombings killed at least 12 civilians in the country’s east and north. The Taliban frequently use roadside bombs and suicide attacks to target Afghan army or police forces across the country.
In Iraq, the deadliest of the attacks took place in the northern Shaab neighborhood when a man wearing an explosive vest detonated himself in a crowded market, killing nine people and wounding 25.
Earlier, at the Aden checkpoint in Baghdad’s Khazimiyah district, a suicide car bombing killed eight people, including five civilians, and wounded 23.
In Baghdad’s al-Askan district, a car bomb killed at least four people and wounded 11 on a commercial street as people gathered after sunset to break their daily fast for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Police also said a roadside bomb on a commercial street in Baghdad’s al-Amal neighborhood killed two people and wounded seven.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.