KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber wearing a vest with explosives blew himself up Monday, killing 31 people, as residents lined up for identification cards at a census office in northern Afghanistan, Afghan security officials said.
The attack at the government center in Imam Saib, a remote district of Kunduz province, was the fifth suicide bombing with major casualties in Afghanistan in four weeks. All the victims were civilians, said Abdul Rahman Saidkhaili, the provincial police chief. He said the target had been the district governor, whose office is next to the census department's.
The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying that a member from Logar province had carried out the attack and that its goal was to halt a new program backed by NATO to enroll large numbers of people into the Afghan Local Police, an auxiliary organization designed to safeguard neighborhoods.
"He entered the recruitment and enrollment center of the Afghan government and foreigner-supported program called the Local Police and carried out a martyrdom attack," said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for northern and eastern Afghanistan.
Local officials disputed Mujahid's depiction of the office as a recruitment center. "It was a census office," said Mohammed Ayoub Haqyar, the district governor. "There might be people or youths lined up for ID cards who later wanted to join either Afghan Local Police" or other organizations, he said.
Because of widespread joblessness, the office attracted many youths "eager to join the Afghan security forces," Haqyar said, "but there were people who were not the age to join the police or army — some were over 60 and some were less than 15 years old."
The suicide attack came three weeks after Saidkhaili and other local officials said that the province had been cleared of insurgents.
Pashtuns who live in the areas previously dominated by the Taliban said that the clearing operations appeared to have been superficial and that the insurgents were already returning.
"The Taliban were responsible for an attack on a German patrol in recent days," said Abdul Momin Omarkhel, a Pashtun whose brother, the governor of Chardara, a predominantly Pashtun district of Kunduz province, was assassinated several weeks ago. "While it is true that the government had an operation in Chardara and claimed it had removed the Taliban, they couldn't maintain security there, and we are seeing signs of Taliban tentacles again in some area of the district."
Ethnic tensions run high in Kunduz, a melting pot of Tajiks, Pashtuns and Uzbeks. It was the Taliban's stronghold in the north when they ruled the country. There has been a controversial effort to establish an Afghan Local Police program in the province, with some Pashtuns worried that mostly non-Pashtuns would take the jobs and Pashtuns themselves would become targets.
Also on Monday, in southern Afghanistan, a Taliban commander from the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province announced that he was renouncing violence and joining the government, bringing 30 fighters with him.
The decision by the commander, Toor Jan, 28, underscored the opening that exists for the Afghan government's reintegration program, which seeks to persuade lower-level fighters to lay down their arms and offers the opportunity for midlevel leaders to reconcile. Still unclear, however, is whether the Afghan government can protect those who wish to reconcile.
Jan, who most recently had been in Pakistan but had been a front-line fighter in the Panjwai and Arghandab Districts, crossed the border with eight of his men sometime in the last few days. He said the intelligence director in Kandahar and the provincial council chief, Ahmad Wali Karzai, had promised him protection from both Taliban and NATO forces, as well as government jobs for him and his men. But that has proved difficult for the government to deliver in the past, and it remains to be seen if the program is working better now.
The developments came as the local authorities in Nangahar province in eastern Afghanistan said a family of six — including the father, a soldier in the Afghan National Army — were killed Sunday night in a NATO airstrike.
NATO forces said they were investigating the allegation.