The explosion on Tuesday near a bus station also wounded at least 40 people, some of them seriously.

Witnesses said the blast occurred when a large truck bomb went off in a crowded area in the town controlled by Turkish-backed militants.

Videos and images circulated by activists on social media showed large plumes of smoke rising from the blast site, along with several fires and damaged buildings.

At least 30 others were also wounded in the incident, which took place in eastern Laghman province’s capital, Mehtarlam, Afghanistan’s interior ministry said on Monday.

The condition of the governor, Rahmatullah Yarmal, was not immediately known and officials would not confirm local reports that he was slightly wounded in the bombing. Yarmal escaped unharmed, a provincial police spokesperson said, Al Jazeera reported.

Interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said four of Yarmal’s bodyguards had been killed in the bombing. He said the wounded included 28 civilians and two other guards.

No group has claimed responsibility for the incident. Both the Taliban and Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) are active in the area.

The Taliban group has carried out assassinations of high-profile Afghan officials recently, while both groups attack government representatives, national security and defense personnel as well as civilians.

According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), at least 1,282 civilians were killed and 2,176 others wounded in the first six months of this year.

Violence in Afghanistan has not abated even as representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban are holding intra-Afghan negotiations in Qatar, where the Taliban have a political office.

The negotiations are meant to end the country’s decades-long long war, following a peace deal between the United States and the Taliban, signed in February in Qatar’s capital, Doha.

The talks that started last month in Doha aim at reaching an agreement on a reduction of violence and a possible new power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is travelling to Qatar on Monday for a bilateral meeting with Qatari leaders but will not hold a meeting with Taliban officials even as peace talks are under way in Doha, officials said.

“Several meetings are planned to discuss efforts for deepening Afghanistan-Qatar ties and mutual cooperation in various areas,” a close aide to Ghani told Reuters news agency, adding that Ghani will also meet the Afghan representatives who are holding talks with Taliban.

“But it is clear that Ghani will not meet the Taliban officials as there has been no reduction of violence and they continue to kill innocent civilians,” a senior western diplomat overseeing the ongoing peace process told Reuters.

So far, there has been no progress in the Doha negotiations as the warring Afghan sides have become bogged down on processes and procedures, diplomatic sources said.

The incident took place in a village near the city of Azaz in Aleppo province, the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Sunday.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the booby-trapped car exploded at a roundabout leading to the entrance of the Bab al-Salam border post, Press TV reported.

The SOHR chief Rami Abdel Rahman says seven people – including five civilians – have been killed and over 60 others wounded, but Anadolu puts the number of wounded at 85.

There were women and children among the wounded, AFP quotes the SOHR chief as saying.

The injured civilians, some of whom are in critical conditions, have been transported across the Turkish border, and hospitalized in the city of Kilis, the report said.

Turkish-backed militants seized the town as a result of Ankara’s Operation Euphrates Shield launched in 2016.

Northern Syria is regularly rocked by bomb blasts, blamed by Ankara on the Kurdish-led People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey regards as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

However, SOHR blames Daesh for Sunday’s attack, saying it was possibly in retaliation for a surge in operations by Turkish and Turkish-backed forces against Daesh cells in the region.

The deadly attack took place as Syrians voted to elect a new parliament, including, for the first time in years, in former rebel bastions.

More than 7,400 polling stations opened at 7:30 a.m. local time (0430 GMT) on Sunday, including in former militant strongholds of Eastern Ghouta, east of central Damascus, and the southern countryside of the northwestern Idlib province.

President Bashar al-Assad’s Baath party and his allies are expected to win most of the parliament’s 250 seats in the third such polls to be held in Syria ever since foreign-sponsored militancy broke out in March 2011. The two previous polls were staged in May 2012 and April 2016 respectively. In the last legislative elections in 2016, turnout stood at 57.56 percent.