KABUL (Dispatches) -- A roadside bomb in Kabul targeted first Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh on Wednesday morning but he escaped unharmed, his spokesman said. The attack killed at least 10 people.
The Taliban denied involvement in the attack, which comes just ahead of long-awaited peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban in Qatar’s capital Doha.
"Today, once again the enemy of Afghanistan tried to harm Saleh, but they failed in their evil aim, and Saleh escaped the attack unharmed,” Razwan Murad, a spokesman for Saleh’s office, wrote on Facebook.
He told Reuters the bomb targeted Saleh’s convoy and some of his bodyguards were injured. Saleh appeared in a video on his social media accounts soon after, saying he had sustained a minor burn on his face and an injury to his hand in the attack.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a post on Twitter that Taliban fighters were not involved in the blast.
The former intelligence chief and the senior of President Ashraf Ghani’s two vice-presidents, has survived several assassination attempts, including one on his office last year that killed 20 people.
Wednesday’s blast killed at least 10 civilians and wounded 15 people including Saleh’s security guards, according to the interior ministry.
"Such attacks won’t weaken our resolve for a lasting and dignified peace in Afghanistan,” Javid Faisal, spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a tweet.
International powers including the European Union, Iran and Pakistan also condemned the attack.
In a statement, Iran’s Foreign


Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh denounced the assassination attempt "by the enemies of Afghanistan’s peace and stability” ahead of intra-Afghan negotiations.
"This is an attack on the Republic, & desperate act by spoilers of peace efforts, who must be collectively confronted,” the EU Delegation in Afghanistan said in a statement on Twitter.
Both the Taliban and the Daesh group are active in Kabul where tensions are also high ahead of the expected start of negotiations between an official Afghan delegation and the Taliban.

U.S. Troop Withdrawal

U.S. President Donald Trump was expected to announce further troop withdrawals Wednesday from Afghanistan and from Iraq, where U.S. troops have faced increasing attacks.
During Washington talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi last month, Trump said U.S. forces would leave Iraq but gave no timetable or specific troop levels.
A senior administration official told reporters that the president would make an announcement on Wednesday, but offered no additional details.
The U.S. deployed thousands of forces to Iraq in 2014 to purportedly lead a military intervention against the Daesh group, which had swept across a third of the country.
Even after Baghdad declared Daesh defeated in late 2017, U.S. and other foreign troops continued their presence.
By late 2018, there were an estimated 5,200 troops still stationed in Iraq, making up the bulk of the 7,500 foreign forces there, according to U.S. officials.
Over the past year, dozens of rocket attacks have targeted those forces as well as the U.S. embassy in Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone, killing at least five military personnel -- three Americans, one Briton and one Iraqi.
Tensions skyrocketed early this year when the U.S. assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and Iraq’s key anti-terror figure Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, prompting Tehran to mount a retaliatory missile strike against U.S. troops in western Iraq.
Enraged by the U.S. strike, the Iraqi parliament voted to oust all foreign troops still left in Iraq, although Kadhimi’s government has stonewalled that decision.
Instead, the U.S. military has been quietly redeploying troops on its own since March, consolidating its presence from a dozen bases across the country to just three.
Some troops were redeployed to the main bases in Baghdad, Arbil in the north and Ain al-Asad in the west, but most were transferred outside of Iraq, U.S. officials told AFP.
They said the downsizing was long-planned, but admitted that the withdrawal timeline was accelerated in response to rocket attacks and the fear Covid-19 could spread among military partners.
Last month, armed Iraqi factions threatened to target U.S. interests in the country after Trump declined to give a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq during an Oval Office meeting with Kadhimi.
France has already withdrawn its troops and Britain has significantly downsized to just 100 personnel in recent months.
British, French and U.S. special forces are expected to remain deployed in undisclosed locations around the country, diplomatic sources said.
Still, attacks on U.S. targets have continued. Late Tuesday, a bomb targeted a supply convoy heading to a base where U.S. troops are deployed, killing one.
The U.S. president is also set to announce further withdrawals from Afghanistan in the coming days, the senior administration official said.
Washington currently has 8,600 soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. The Pentagon said in August that its goal was to get down to fewer than 5,000 troops as inter-Afghan peace talks progress.
Trump previously mentioned in an interview with Axios that the White House aimed to reach 4,000 to 5,000 troops in Afghanistan before the U.S. presidential election on November 3.
Under the U.S.-Taliban deal, all foreign troops must leave the country by the spring of 2021, in exchange for security commitments from the militants.
Trump, who is trailing Democratic rival Joe Biden in the opinion polls, has previously promised to bring troops home in a bid to end what he has called America’s endless wars.