KABUL, Sep 10 (AFP) - Taliban militants claimed responsibility Friday for a rocket attack on the capital Kabul which injured two civilians in the latest violence ahead of next month's elections.
Five rockets were fired Thursday on Kabul and a NATO-led peacekeepers' base two days after campaigning began for October's landmark presidential election, which remnants of the ousted hardline Taliban regime have vowed to disrupt.
A man who identified himself as Taliban spokesman, Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi, called AFP on Friday from an unknown location and claimed responsibility for the attacks.
"Our mujahedin fired the rockets on Kabul last night, but unfortunately some of the rockets missed the foreign troops in Kabul," Hakimi said.
Kabul is still recovering from an August 29 car bomb that hit a US security firm killing at least nine people.
In less than two months there have been five rocket strikes on Kabul, not including Thursday's, compared with a total of around 20 since 2002, but the attacks rarely hit their targets.
Meanwhile in southern Afghanistan, one US soldier was wounded Thursday night when suspected Taliban militias ambushed a US patrol in the troubled province of Uruzgan, the US military said Friday.
"A US soldier received shrapnel wounds in an attack in the Uruzgan province Thursday night. The soldier has been medically evacuated to Kandahar Airfield and is in stable condition," the military said in an emailed statement.
Militants in the province, which is a stronghold for Taliban loyalists, attacked the patrol with rocket-propelled grenades, small arms fire and machine guns, the statement said.
There are some 18,500 US-led soldiers hunting remnants of the Taliban regime which was ousted by a US-led air campaign in 2001 while around 8,000 NATO-led peacekeepers are patrolling Kabul and some provinces of northern Afghanistan.