A powerful early morning suicide truck bomb devastated a hospital in southern Afghanistan on Thursday.
The explosion killed as many as 20 people and wounded more than 90 others, Afghan officials said.
Taliban claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing.
Thursday’s massive explosion destroyed part of the hospital in Qalat, the capital of southern Zabul province, and left a fleet of ambulances broken and battered, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
Local residents, many of whom had come to see their sick family members, used shawls and blankets to carry the wounded inside the destroyed building, while authorities scrambled to take the worst of the wounded to hospitals in nearby Kandahar.
Hours earlier, a drone attack in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province blamed on US forces killed and wounded as many as 30 people, most of them civilians, said Jawaid Zaman, presidential adviser on tribal affairs.
There was no immediate response to a request for comment from the US military in Afghanistan.
Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor, said the target was ISIS group militants who are in the area.
According to AP, Zaman said the local residents had notified the authorities in the area that they would be collecting dried fruit.
As many as 50 people were in the fields when the aerial attack occurred, Zaman noted.
