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Kandahar (AFP) March 14, 2010 A loud explosion on Saturday rocked the centre of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, capital of the country's former Taliban rulers, an interior ministry spokesman said. The cause of the blast, which happened around 8:00 pm (1530 GMT), was not immediately clear, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashery told AFP. "We are investigating," he said. There were no immediate reports of casualties. An AFP correspondent in Kandahar said he heard four successive blasts in the centre of the city, followed by small arms fire. The explosions seemed to have taken place near police headquarters and other government buildings, he said, adding that windows in buildings across a large area of the city had been shattered by the force of the blasts. Kandahar is Afghanistan's third biggest city -- after Kabul and Herat -- and was the spiritual capital of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until their overthrow in the 2001 US-led invasion. Remnants of the movement have regrouped to wage an increasingly deadly insurgency, which last year killed more than 500 foreign soldiers. Around 121,000 US and NATO soldiers are based in Afghanistan fighting the insurgents, with another 30,000 due to be deployed, mostly to the south, by August as part of a major new strategy designed to end the war. A huge military campaign is under way in neighbouring Helmand province, aimed at driving out Taliban militants who run some regions in tandem with drug traffickers. The southern provinces are the source of most of the world's heroin in an illicit industry worth up to three billion dollars a year, which funds the insurgency and has transformed Afghanistan into a narco-state. Afghan, US and NATO leaders have made clear that Kandahar is also slated for military operations that will pave the way for civilian control as part of the new counter-insurgency strategy.
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