KABUL: At least 21 people were killed and 38 others were injured when a bus collided with an oil tanker and a motorbike in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, provincial officials said.

Deadly traffic accidents are common in the South Asian country due in part to poor roads, dangerous driving on highways and a lack of regulation.

"On Sunday morning, 21 people were killed, and 38 people were injured [in] a collision between a tanker, a motorcycle and a passenger bus," the information department of Helmand province said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The accident took place on the Herat-Kandahar highway in Helmand's Grishk district, it added.

The collision caused the vehicles to ignite, Mohammad Qasim Riyaz, the Helmand governor's spokesman, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

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, officials said.

Of the injured, 11 were seriously hurt, and the rest had minor injuries.

The passenger bus was traveling from the city of Herat to the capital Kabul when it first collided with a motorbike carrying two people, killing both, the information department said, citing Helmand traffic management officials.

The bus driver lost control and crashed with an oil tanker traveling in the opposite direction from the southern city of Kandahar, sparking a fire.

The accident killed three people on the tanker and 16 bus passengers.

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.