KUNDUZ: A district governor and 11 policemen were killed in weekend Taliban attacks across Afghanistan, authorities said Sunday, in the latest violence gripping the troubled nation.
Six border police officers were killed when Taliban-linked rebels stormed their post on the Tajikistan border in the northern province of Kunduz late Saturday, Mohammad Ayoub, a local official told AFP.
The attack in the province’s Imam Saheb district, where the insurgents have a strong presence, was "facilitated by two policemen linked to the Taliban", said local administrator Ayoub.
In neighboring Qala-i-Zal district, also on Saturday, rebels killed the district chief using a remote-controlled bomb, according to an interior ministry statement and local government spokesman.
Local leader Malim Nazeer "was on his way from the district to the provincial capital when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, killing him, his driver and wounding two others including his son," said Mehbubullah Sayeedi, the provincial governor’s spokesman.
In the remote northeastern province of Badakhshan another Taliban bomb on Saturday killed five police officers while on patrol, the interior ministry said in a separate statement.
The ministry blamed the bombing on the "enemies of Afghanistan," a term used to refer to the Taliban and other insurgents linked to them.
Also Saturday, in southern Zabul province, 13 insurgents were killed in a combined Afghan-international forces operation on a known Taliban hideout, said provincial spokesman Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar.
"In the operation 13 Taliban were killed — they left the dead bodies on the battlefield," he said, adding that weapons and ammunition had been seized from the hideout.
Afghanistan is in the grip of an insurgency now in its ninth year, with violence reaching record levels since the start of 2009.
A total of 872 foreign soldiers, part of a US-led military deployment in Afghanistan, have lost their lives, mostly in Taliban attacks, since January 2009, according to an AFP count.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force reported on Saturday that six soldiers had died that day, five of them in separate combat incidents, one in an accidental explosion.
The deaths took the toll so far for 2010 to 352, 30 of them this month alone. The AFP count is based on the tally kept by the independent icasualties.org website.
