Nearly 40 people injured after a bus collided with an oil tanker on a highway in Helmand province, officials said.

The crash on the Kandahar-Herat highway involved a motorcycle, a fuel truck and a bus travelling from Herat city to the capital Kabul, said Sher Mohammad Wahdat, head of the information department for Helmand’s provincial government.

The bus driver lost control after colliding with the motorcycle and crashed with an oil tanker travelling in the opposite direction from the southern city of Kandahar to Herat, sparking a fire.

“On Sunday morning, 21 people were killed and 38 people were injured due to a collision between a tanker, a motorcycle and a passenger bus,” the provincial information department said in a post on X.

An investigation into the accident was under way, said Qadratullah, a traffic official in Helmand.

Helmand police chief spokesman Hzatullah Haqqani said 11 of the 38 injured people were transferred to hospitals with serious injuries.

Images shared by the information department on social media showed charred, twisted metal scattered across the highway and the crushed cabin of the tanker.

Cleanup crews were on site removing the debris, according to officials.

Traffic accidents are common in Afghanistan, mainly due to poor road conditions and driver carelessness.

The country’s low-lying roads and lack of traffic signs are also drivers of road accidents.

Another serious accident involving an oil tanker took place in December 2022, when the vehicle overturned and caught fire in Afghanistan’s high-altitude Salang Pass, killing 31 people and leaving dozens more with burn injuries.

Road traffic accidents reach into the hundreds, yearly and result in high fatalities. More than 1,600 people died and more than 4,000 have been injured in the past 10 months, according to the country’s General Directorate of Traffic Police.