Fifty nine children were killed and 96 others were wounded by an awful suicide attack in northern Afghanistan earlier this week, the Education Ministry said Friday.

Afghanistan has held official funerals for lawmakers killed in the nation's deadliest suicide bombing since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

Afghans have begun three days of national mourning for 41 people, made up mostly of children as well as six MPs, killed in the country's worst suicide attack.

At least 64 people, including 5 members of Parliament, were killed by two bomb blasts in north Afghanistan – in the deadliest attack since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, officials said.

A suicide bomber killed 90 people and wounded 50 on Tuesday in an attack on a group of visiting Afghan parliamentarians in the northern Afghan town of Baghlan, the director of the local hospital said.

An Australian soldier serving as a bomb disposal expert has been seriously wounded in Afghanistan after a roadside bomb blew up as he tried to defuse it.

Talks between Japan's Government and the Opposition have failed to resolve a stand-off over the country's involvement in anti-terrorism operations in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, a nation once renowned for its artists and intellectuals, has again begun to sprout a vibrant arts movement. For years, artistic expression was stifled in the war-torn nation by religious extremists but now has been reborn. Evidence of this comes in an exhibit of photographs taken by young Afghans and now being displayed in Washington, DC's, Goethe-Institut.

Local Afghan officials say Taliban insurgents have overrun a second district in western Farah province.

Afghan forces said they have killed 50 more Taliban militants in the heaviest fighting in a western province since the fall of the Islamist regime in 2001.

It was a day of diplomatic embarrassment for Japan today as it was forced to withdraw from the military coalition supporting operations in Afghanistan.

Several Taliban militants were killed during two raids carried out by coalition forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the US-led force said.