KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – International troops opened fire on a bus carrying Afghan civilians Monday, killing four people, officials said, setting off anti-American protests in a key southern city where coalition forces hope to rally the public for a coming offensive against the Taliban.

NATO and Afghan authorities declined to identify the international forces involved by nationality, although numerous Afghans said they were American.

Elsewhere in the city of Kandahar, three suicide bombers attacked an Afghan intelligence services compound, but security forces who opened fire repelled them, said the spokesman for the government of the surrounding province, also called Kandahar. Four intelligence agents and six civilians, including a teacher at a nearby school were wounded in the attack, said the spokesman, Zelmai Ayubi.

Five members of a single family were killed and two wounded in a roadside bombing in the Bala Buluk district of the northwestern province of Farah on Monday afternoon, according to provincial spokesman Ahmad Farid Ayubi. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, although such bombs are a hallmark of the Taliban insurgency.

Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan, was the birthplace of the Taliban regime ousted in 2001 and insurgents remain active there despite a heavy presence of foreign forces. Securing it is key to the U.S. military and NATO’s aim of turning around the more than eight-year war, but anger stirred by civilian deaths threatens to undercut local support for the central government in Kabul.

More than 80,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, many of them deployed to volatile southern provinces including Kandahar.

Monday’s pre-dawn shooting on the bus in Kandahar province’s Zhari district killed four, including one woman, and wounded another 18 people, Ayubi said. He said international forces took 12 of the wounded to a military hospital.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

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