Taliban Suicide Bomber Kills US Troops

A dozen US troops and civilian workers have been killed after a Taliban suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into an armoured Nato vehicle in Afghanistan.

A Canadian soldier, three Afghan civilians and a policeman also died in what was the deadliest single ground attack on coalition forces in the 10-year-long war.

Nato said: "Five International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) service members and eight Isaf civilian employees died following a suicide vehicle-born improvised explosive device attack in Kabul."

The assault took place on a Nato convoy in the capital. An explosion, which happened as the vehicles were passing the American University, caused a fireball.

Heavy black smoke poured from burning wreckage at the site and the street was littered with shrapnel.

The armoured personnel carrier, known as a Rhino, was travelling between a convoy of mine-resistant military vehicles on a road often used by Nato forces in the southwestern part of the city.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they packed a 4x4 vehicle with 700kg of explosives.

The assault happened on the same day Nato and Afghan officials met elsewhere in the city to discuss moving security responsibilities to Afghan forces in all or part of 17 of the nation's 34 provinces.

Nato plans to withdraw all its combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Some Afghans fear their own security forces will be unable to cope with the insurgency and the country may fall into civil war.

Deadly attacks are relatively rare in heavily-guarded Kabul, compared with the south and east of Afghanistan.

But the latest killings came less than two months after insurgents launched a 20-hour assault on the US embassy in the capital, killing more than a dozen people.

Meanwhile, three Australians and an Afghan linguist were killed in Uruzgan province in the south when an attacker in an Afghan National Army uniform opened fire, authorities said.