A series of suicide attacks in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar killed at least 27 people on Saturday, a senior official said, in the country\'s deadliest assault so far this year.
Kandahar authorities appealed for all health workers to immediately report for duty and for citizens to go to health centres to donate blood.
"We have now received 27 bodies and there are at least 52 people wounded, all figures include civilians and policemen," Abdul Qayoom Pukhla, Kandahar\'s public health director told AFP.
An official with an international aid organisation, who did not want to be identified, said there were 30 dead at Kandahar\'s Mirwais hospital, but the figure could not be immediately confirmed with city officials.
"We are in urgent need," said an announcement on local television appealing for residents to donate blood and all doctors and nurses to report to the hospital to offer help.
The attack comes as tens of thousands of extra troops are arriving in Afghanistan as part of a new US-led counter-insurgency strategy aimed at speeding an end to the war on the Taliban uprising, now in its ninth year.
The first major offensive of the new strategy is taking place in Helmand province, neighbouring Kandahar province, and US military leaders say Taliban strongholds in Kandahar are among future targets.
The explosions began around 8:00 pm (1530 GMT), interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashery told AFP earlier.
An AFP reporter in the city said windows in buildings across a large area of the city had been shattered by the force of the blasts.
A police officer with the provincial police headquarters, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been a total of five explosions at different locations around the city.
"There were five suicide attacks using bicycles and motorbikes in Kandahar city," he said.
"One happened close to the provincial prison, the second one next to the Red Mosque," which is near the home of President Hamid Karzai\'s brother Wali Karzai, the elected leader of the Kandahar provincial council, he said.
Another attack took place close to provincial police headquarters, another near the home of Gul Agha Shairzai, former Kandahar provincial governor and now governor of Nangahar province, the police officer added.
The interior ministry\'s Bashery said the city\'s main prison was one of the main targets of what appears to have been a coordinated series of attacks bearing the hallmarks of the Taliban.
Up to 1,000 Taliban inmates escaped from the Sarpoza prison in June 2008 after a brazen suicide attack blew open the front gates and destroyed the walls.
BBC television said a Taliban spokesman had claimed responsibility for Saturday\'s carnage.
Kandahar was the site in late August of a massive truck bomb that killed 43 people and injured another 65, most of them civilians, in the deadliest attack for Afghanistan in 2009.
Taliban denials of involvement in that attack were dismissed as the militants often distance themselves from operations that claim high numbers of civilian lives.
The city, capital of the eponymous province, is symbolic of the Taliban uprising blighting the country. It is the seat of the movement and was its capital during the extremists\' rule which ended in 2001 when US-led troops invaded.
Remnants of the movement have since regrouped to wage an increasingly deadly insurgency, which last year killed more than 500 foreign troops.
The insurgents have supplemented suicide vehicles -- usually sedans and off-road vehicles -- with roadside bombs, which have taken an enormous toll on the foreign troops leading the fight.
US President Barack Obama and NATO allies have pledged to boost troops to 150,000, from 121,000, by August this year, with most of the new deployments headed to the volatile south.
The first test of the new tactic is taking place in a poppy-growing plain of central Helmand, where Taliban militants have for years controlled the Marjah farming region along with drug traffickers.
Helmand is 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 aimed at paving the way for the reestablishment of Afghan government control.
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