Taliban ambush kills 15 police in Afghanistan

Taliban insurgents have killed
15 police on a key highway in western
Afghanistan, officials said Thursday, the
latest in a growing number of rebel attacks
as NATO-led troops withdraw.
“Highway One” is Afghanistan’s main
national road, connecting the cities of Kabul,
Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, but it
has been a constant target of insurgent
attacks, kidnappings and looting.
“A convoy of police who went to inspect a
highway patrol unit were caught in a
Taliban ambush on Wednesday,” Farah
province spokesman Abdul Rahman
Zhuwandi told AFP.
“There was fighting between them in which
15 national police were killed and 10
wounded, while several Taliban were also
killed.”
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the
attack shortly before dusk in Farah
province’s ethnically Pashtun district of
Bakwa.
The ambush raised the death toll from
Taliban strikes on Wednesday to more than
30, including a US soldier, four policemen
and three civilians who died when
insurgents tried to storm a NATO-Afghan
base in the eastern city of Ghazni.
Foreign troops are gradually withdrawing
from Afghanistan as local security forces
take over responsibility for battling the
Taliban, who have launched a spate of
recent attacks across the south, east and
west.
Afghan and international leaders are trying
to open peace negotiations with the
militants before a presidential election in
April and the departure of all 87,000 NATO
combat troops by the end of 2014.
In Wednesday’s attack in Ghazni, about ten
insurgents attacked a base that houses the
provincial reconstruction team, one of the
units that deploys foreign military and
civilian staff to help development projects.
After a suicide bomb was detonated at the
entrance, some insurgents managed to
enter the base before being shot. Ten Polish
soldiers were wounded.
Also on Wednesday, another Taliban strike
on Highway One in Farah killed four drivers
and set ablaze 40 trucks carrying NATO fuel
supplies when a rocket was fired at a
parking lot.
A suicide bomber rammed his explosives-
laden car into a convoy of NATO troops in
Helmand, killing four civilians.
The latest killings came after President
Hamid Karzai, on a two-day trip to Pakistan
earlier this week, called on Islamabad to
help set up talks to end 12 years of war
against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Sections of the Pakistani state have been
widely accused of funding and controlling
the Islamist rebels for years, and many
Islamist militant fighters live in Pakistan
close to the Afghanistan border.
But Pakistan, which backed the Taliban’s
1996-2001 rule of Kabul, denies the
allegations and says it will work to stop the
war in Afghanistan.
The Taliban regularly target foreign and
Afghan soldiers, police and government
employees in their guerrilla war against
Karzai’s Western-backed government.
Five Afghan aid workers and an government
employee were killed on Monday in Herat
province, and six truck drivers were found
dead in the eastern province of Paktia two
weeks after being kidnapped.