MUHMUD RAQI, Afghanistan – At least 84 Afghan girls were admitted to a hospital Tuesday for headaches and vomiting in the third apparent poison attack on a girls school in as many weeks, officials and doctors said.

The students were lining up outside their school in northeastern Afghanistan on Tuesday morning when a strange odor filled the yard, and one girl collapsed, said the school’s principal, Mossena, who was herself in a hospital bed gasping for breath as she described the event.

“We took her inside and splashed water on her face,” said Mossena, who like many Afghans goes by one name. Then other girls started passing out, and all the students were sent home.

It was unclear if the incident was a deliberate attack on the school, though the Taliban and other conservative extremist groups in Afghanistan who oppose girls’ education have been known to target schoolgirls. Under the Taliban’s 1996-2001 regime, girls were not allowed to attend school.

Mossena said she did not know what happened next because she collapsed and woke up in the main hospital in Muhmud Raqi, the capital of Kapisa province, which lies just northeast of Kabul.

At least 98 patients were admitted from Aftab Bachi school, including the principal, 11 teachers and two cleaners, said Khalid Enayat, the hospital’s deputy director. He said about another 30 students were being monitored to see if they developed symptoms, although they were not admitted to the hospital.

Tuesday’s apparent attack is the third alleged poisoning at a girls’ school in less than three weeks. It comes one day after 61 schoolgirls and one teacher from a school in neighboring Parwan province were admitted to a hospital after complaining of sudden illness. They were irritable, confused and weeping, and several of the girls passed out.

The first apparent poison attack took place late last month in Parwan, when dozens of girls were hospitalized after being sickened by what Afghan officials said were strong fumes or a possible poison gas cloud.

The patients in Kapisa complained of similar symptoms to those in the Parwan incidents — headaches, vomiting and shivering, said Aziz Agha, a doctor treating the girls.

Interior Ministry Spokesman Zemeri Bashary said officials suspect some sort of gas poisoning, and that police were still investigating. Hospital officials said blood samples had been sent to medical authorities in Kabul for testing.

Though it was unclear if the recent incidents were the result of attacks, militants in the south have previously assaulted schoolgirls by spraying acid in their faces and burning down schools to protest the government.

Scores of Afghan schools have been forced to close because of violence. Still, the three recent apparent poisonings have taken place in northeast Afghanistan, which is not as opposed to education for girls as Afghanistan’s conservative southern regions.

But with no group claiming responsibility, the sicknesses could be a result of a group hysteria sparked by one student’s illness. An education official for Parwan province said they had not found any evidence of an attack in Tuesday’s incident. He said one student fell ill before the others and suggested that some of the illnesses could have been psychological.

Research has borne out this possibility. At a Tennessee school in 1998, 38 people were hospitalized with complaints of dizziness, headaches, nausea and shortness of breath after a teacher noticed a gasoline smell in a classroom, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that there had been no toxic exposure and that the sickness appeared to be psychological.

Fifth-grader Tahira said she planned to go back to school when she felt better, but that now it would fill her with fear.

“I’m going to be scared when I go back to school. What if we die?” the startled looking 11-year-old said from her hospital bed.

Associated Press reporter Heidi Vogt contributed reporting from Kabul.

By Amir Shah, Heidi Vogt

KABUL, Afghanistan – A U.S.-led coalition airstrike hit an Afghan army checkpoint Wednesday, killing nine soldiers, Afghan officials said, and the American military acknowledged that its forces may have “mistakenly” killed allied troops.

The U.S. acknowledged that its forces “may have mistakenly killed and injured” Afghan soldiers in what may have been a case of mistaken identity “on both sides.” The deaths come as Afghan President Hamid Karzai presses international forces to avoid airstrikes in civilian areas.

Arsallah Jamal, the province’s governor, said the Afghan soldiers died at a fixed army checkpoint in a region where American and Afghan troops have been conducting operations for over a week. Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the Defense Ministry spokesman, confirmed nine soldiers died and three were wounded in the airstrike in the Sayed Kheil area of Khost province in eastern Afghanistan.

“As a Coalition forces convoy was returning from a previous operation, they were involved in multiple engagements,” a U.S. military statement said. “As a result of the engagements, ANA (Afghan army) soldiers were killed and injured.”

Col. Greg Julian, the chief spokesman for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said American officials would meet with Afghan defense officials to “sort out the details.”

In June 2007, Afghan police mistook U.S. troops on a nighttime mission for Taliban fighters and opened fire on them, prompting U.S. forces to return fire and call in attack aircraft. Seven Afghan police were killed.

In the last month, uniformed Afghan police officers have twice opened fire on U.S. troops, killing two soldiers. The police officers were killed by U.S. soldiers returning fire, but the incidents raised fears that insurgents have infiltrated Afghanistan’s security forces as a cover to launch attacks.

In the country’s southern Uruzgan province, a two-day battle that ended early Wednesday killed 35 Taliban fighters and three Afghan police, said Juma Gul Himat, Uruzgan’s provincial police chief.

Himat said the battle was led by Afghan forces but also involved helicopter gunships. Afghan forces recovered 35 bodies from the battlefield, he said. Some 100 Taliban fighters were involved in the battle.

In other violence, U.S. troops killed seven militants and detained seven others in a series of operations throughout Afghanistan, the military said in a statement. Among the dead was a Taliban leader in Helmand province responsible for attacks on coalition forces and Afghan security checkpoints, the U.S. said.

More than 5,200 people – mostly militants – have died in insurgency related violence this year, according to an Associated Press count of figures from Western and Afghan officials.

Gayle Williams

KABUL, Afghanistan – Taliban assailants on a motorbike gunned down a Christian aid worker in Kabul on Monday and the militants said she was killed for spreading her religion — a rare targeted killing of a Westerner in the nation’s capital.

Gayle Williams, a 34-year-old dual British-South African national who helped handicapped Afghans, was shot to death as she was walking to work about 8 a.m., said Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary.

A spokesman for the militants said the Taliban ordered her killed because she was accused of proselytizing.

“This woman came to Afghanistan to teach Christianity to the people of Afghanistan,” Zabiullah Mujahid told The Associated Press. “Our (leaders) issued a decree to kill this woman.”

Britain’s secretary of state for international development called the killing a “callous and cowardly act” and said Williams was in Afghanistan to help ease poverty.

“To present her killing as a religious act is as despicable as it is absurd — it was cold blooded murder,” Douglas Alexander said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the aid group, SERVE — Serving Emergency Relief and Vocational Enterprises — said it is a Christian organization but denied it was involved in proselytizing.

“It’s not the case that they preach, not at all,” said the spokeswoman, Rina van der Ende. “They are here to do NGO (aid) work.”

Afghanistan is a conservative Islamic nation. Proselytizing is prohibited by law, and other Christian missionaries or charities have faced severe hostility. Last year, 23 South Korean aid workers from a church group were taken hostage in southern Afghanistan. Two were killed and the rest were eventually released.

According to its Web site, SERVE is a Christian charity registered in Britain and has been working with Afghan refugees since 1980 in Pakistan.

“SERVE Afghanistan’s purpose is to express God’s love and bring hope by serving the people of Afghanistan, especially the needy, as we seek to address personal, social and environmental needs,” the site says.

A member of Afghanistan’s highest religious council said Monday that rumors have spread over the last two years that Westerners have been preaching Christianity to Afghans.

“We have heard rumors that houses have been rented to preach Christianity in Kabul and some provinces, but we have no evidence that this is taking place,” said council member Jebra Ali. The council previously has made a formal complaint to President Hamid Karzai that Westerners are trying to spread Christianity in Afghanistan.

Monday’s attack adds to a growing sense of insecurity in Kabul. The city is now blanketed with police checkpoints, and embassies, military bases and the U.N. are erecting cement barriers to guard against suicide bombings.

Kidnappings targeting wealthy Afghans have long been a problem in Kabul, but attacks against Westerners have grown recently. In mid-August, Taliban militants killed three women working for the U.S. aid group International Rescue Committee while they were driving in Logar, a province south of Kabul.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber killed two German soldiers and five children in Kunduz province to the north, said Mohammad Omar, the provincial governor. NATO confirmed some of its soldiers were killed or wounded in the attack.

Omar said the soldiers were patrolling on foot when the bomber riding a bicycle hit them. Northern Afghanistan has been spared much of the violence afflicting Afghanistan’s eastern and southern provinces.

West of Kabul, meanwhile, assault helicopters dropped NATO troops into Jalrez district in Wardak province on Thursday, sparking a two-day battle involving airstrikes, the military alliance said in a statement Monday.

More than 20 militants were killed, NATO said.

Wardak province, just 40 miles west of Kabul, has become an insurgent stronghold. Militants have expanded their traditional bases in the country’s south and east — along the border with Pakistan — and have gained territory in the provinces surrounding Kabul, a worrying development for Afghan and NATO troops.

Those advances are part of the reason that top U.S. military officials have warned the international mission to defeat the Taliban is in peril, and why NATO generals have called for a sharp increase in the number of troops.

Some 65,000 international troops now operate in Afghanistan, including about 32,000 Americans.

Speaking in London on Monday, Gen. John Craddock, the head of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, called into question the political will among alliance members for the mission in Afghanistan.

Commanders have called for more NATO troops to be deployed in the violent south, but some NATO members have refused to move their troops from more peaceful parts of the country and have imposed restrictions on the duties their forces can carry out.

“It is this wavering political will that impedes operational progress and brings into question the relevance of the alliance here in the 21st century,” Craddock told the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank.

Associated Press reporter Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.

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SERVE Afghanistan, http://www.serveafghanistan.org

KABUL, Afghanistan — A car bomb ripped through the front wall of the Indian Embassy in central Kabul on Monday, killing 40 people in the deadliest attack in Afghanistan’s capital since the fall of the Taliban, officials said.

The massive explosion detonated by a suicide bomber damaged two embassy vehicles entering the compound, near where dozens of Afghan men line up every morning to apply for visas.

The embassy is located on a busy, tree-lined street near Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry in the city center that is protected on both ends by police checkpoints. Several nearby shops were damaged or destroyed in the blast, and smoldering ruins covered the street. The explosion rattled much of the Afghan capital.

Shortly after the attack, a woman ran out of a Kabul hospital screaming, crying and hitting her face with both of her hands. Her two children, a girl named Lima and a boy named Mirwais, had been killed.

“Oh my God!” the woman screamed. “They are both dead.”

Najib Nikzad, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said the blast killed 40 people. Earlier, Abdullah Fahim, the spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health, said the explosion killed at least 28 people and wounded 141, but an update of the number of injured was not immediately available. The Interior Ministry said six police officers and three embassy guards were among those killed.

In Delhi, India’s foreign minister said four Indians, including the military attache and a diplomat, were killed in the attack. Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said India will send a high-level delegation to Kabul in coming days.

The blast also killed five Afghan security guards at the nearby Indonesian Embassy, where windows were shattered and doors and gates broken. Two diplomats were slightly wounded, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said.

In Washington, Gordon Johndroe, a White House national security spokesman, offered condolences to the victims.

“Extremists continue to show their disregard for all human life and their willingness to kill fellow Muslims as well as others,” he said. “The United States stands with the people of Afghanistan and India as we face this common enemy.”

Afghanistan has seen a sharp rise in violence from Taliban militants in recent months. Insurgents are packing bombs with more explosives than ever, one reason why more U.S. and NATO troops were killed in June than any month since the 2001 invasion.

Still, a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied that the militants were behind the bombing. The Taliban tend to claim responsibility for attacks that inflict heavy tolls on international or Afghan troops, and deny responsibility for attacks that primarily kill Afghan civilians.

“Whenever we do a suicide attack, we confirm it,” Mujahid said. “The Taliban did not do this one.”

The 8:30 a.m. explosion was the deadliest attack in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and the deadliest in Afghanistan since a suicide bomber killed more than 100 people at a dog fighting competition in Kandahar province in February.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the bombing and said it was carried out by militants trying to rupture the friendship between Afghanistan and India.

The Interior Ministry, meanwhile, hinted that the attack was carried out with help from Pakistan’s intelligence service, saying that “terrorists have carried out this attack in coordination and consultation with some of the active intelligence circles in the region.”

In Delhi, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs said the attack would not deter the mission from “fulfilling our commitments to the government and people of Afghanistan.” The Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said Pakistan condemned the attack and terrorism in all forms.

Afghanistan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta visited the embassy shortly after the attack, ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmed Baheen said.

“India and Afghanistan have a deep relationship between each other. Such attacks of the enemy will not harm our relations,” Spanta told the embassy staff, according to Baheen.

The Indian ambassador and his deputy were not inside the embassy at the time of the blast, Baheen said.

Militants have frequently attacked Indian offices and projects around Afghanistan since launching an insurgency after the ouster of the Taliban at the end of the 2001. Many Taliban militants have roots in Pakistan, which has long had a troubled relationship with India.

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the Islamic militia was supported by Pakistan, India’s arch-rival. Pakistan today remains wary of strengthening ties between Afghanistan and India.

The United Nations’ envoy to Afghanistan said that “in no culture, no country, and no religion is there any excuse or justification for such acts.”

“The total disregard for innocent lives is staggering and those behind this must be held responsible,” the envoy, Kai Eide, said.

The U.N. sent an e-mail to its staff advising them to stay off Kabul’s roads because of reports that a second suicide car bomber was in the city.

The embassy attack was the sixth suicide bombing in Kabul this year. Insurgent violence has killed more than 2,200 people — mostly militants — in Afghanistan this year, according to an Associated Press count of official figures.

The embassy in the last several days had beefed up security by installing large, dirt-filled blast walls often used by military forces.

While Afghanistan has seen increasing violence in recent months, Kabul has been largely spared the random bomb attacks that Taliban militants use in their fight against Afghan and international troops.

In September 2006, a suicide bomber near the gates of the Interior Ministry killed 12 people and wounded 42 others. After that blast, additional guards and barriers were posted on the street.

In two separate bombings Monday against police convoys in the country’s south, seven officers were killed and 10 others were wounded, officials said.

In Uruzgan province, a roadside bomb killed four police on patrol and wounded seven others, said provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat.

In the Zhari district of Kandahar, another roadside blast killed three officers and wounded three others, said district chief Niyaz Mohammad Sarhadi.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, meanwhile, said one of its soldiers died in an attack in the south on Sunday.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Militants attacked the city’s main prison with a suicide car bombing and rockets late Friday, killing police and setting hundreds of prisoners free, Afghan officials said.

“All the prisoners escaped. There is no one left,” said Wali Karzai, president of Kandahar’s provincial council and also the brother of President Hamid Karzai.

A suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle at the prison’s gates in the southern Afghan city, Justice Minister Sarwar Danish said.

Danish said he did not have immediate details on how many prisoners might have escaped. But a prison official at the scene, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said most prisoners escaped.

The prison holds common criminals but also Taliban militants fighting NATO troops and the Afghan government.

Officials with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said they were aware of the attack but did not have any details yet.

Last month, some 200 Taliban suspects held at the Kandahar prison ended a weeklong hunger strike after a parliamentary delegation promised their cases would be reviewed.

Lawmaker Habibullah Jan said some of the hunger strikers had been held without trial for more than two years. Others were given lengthy prison sentences after short trials.

Jan said 47 of the prisoners had stitched their mouths shut during the hunger strike in May.

Kandahar — the Taliban’s former stronghold and Afghanistan’s second-largest city — has been the scene of fierce battles between NATO forces, primarily from Canada and the United States and Taliban fighters the last two years.

By Amir Shah, Noor Khan

Afghan boys play during a snow storm in Kabul on Sunday, Feb. 18, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan – Police fled a town in western Afghanistan on Monday and suspected Taliban militants briefly moved in – the second time in a month that the government has lost control of a district in the area.

The police fled to a forest near Bakwa in Farah province a day after a roadside bomb killed four officers involved in opium poppy eradication.

A group of militants moved in and stayed for about 30 minutes, seizing three vehicles before leaving, said provincial Gov. Muhajuddin Baluch.

Baryalaj Khan, spokesman for the Farah police chief, said they had lost contact with police in Bakwa since 11:30 a.m. Interior Ministry spokesman Zemari Bashary said police planned to return to the town Tuesday.

The retreat followed Sunday’s bombing of a car carrying the province’s police chief on his return from destroying poppy fields. The police chief was unharmed, but four other officers in the vehicle were killed and two wounded.

Khan blamed Taliban militants for the attack, saying they were involved in the drug trade; he gave no evidence to support his claim. Bakwa lies about 40 miles from Afghanistan’s biggest opium-producing province of Helmand.

Taliban militants overran Helmand’s town of Musa Qala on Feb. 1, defying a peace deal between the government and elders last fall that capped weeks of fighting. The pact was supposed to bar both Taliban fighters and NATO soldiers from coming within three miles of the town center.

Thousands of residents have fled the area since the Taliban seized Musa Qala, fearing a NATO attack and renewed clashes with the militants. The government is negotiating with elders to get them to persuade the militants to leave.

NATO-led troops have a small presence in Farah province, but alliance officials in Kabul referred all questions on Monday’s retreat to the Ministry of Interior. Officials there could not reached for comment.

In Ghor province, meanwhile, a clash between poppy farmers and police conducting eradication left one civilian dead and two wounded, said deputy provincial governor Kramuddin Rezazada.

Some 500 people had gathered to protest government attempts at poppy eradication following last year’s record crop.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium poppy. In 2006, production in the country rose 49 percent to 6,700 tons – enough to make about 670 tons of heroin.

The government rejected U.S. offers of ground-spraying and pledged it would step up poppy eradication using tractors and manpower.

In southern Afghanistan, suspected insurgents fired a rocket at a Canadian military’s armored vehicle in the city of Kandahar on Sunday, but no troops were injured in the attack, said Capt. Alex Watsen, a spokesman for the force.

Canadians fired back, killing one suspected militant, Watsen said. One policeman also was killed in the ensuing gunfight, he said.

Associated Press Writer Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.