Eight Americans and five Canadians have been killed in two separate attacks in Afghanistan.

The US victims were killed in a suicide bombing at a military base in the southeastern province of Khost. They were not soldiers but CIA agents gathering intelligence on radical Muslims in Afghanistan. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack. The five Canadians - four soldiers and one journalist - lost their lives when the vehicle in which they were travelling hit a roadside bomb in the southern city of Kandahar.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government and NATO are locked in a dispute about an attack in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday in which ten people were killed in an air strike. A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said the victims were innocent civilians, some of them schoolchildren. This announcement sparked anti-American protests in Kabul and other cities.

NATO disputes this version of events, identifying the victims as young Taliban fighters on the basis of its initial investigations. To clarify the matter, NATO is now proposing a joint investigation with the Afghan authorities.