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Taliban massacre Afghan police officers

Taliban fighters ambushed and killed 18 Afghan policemen in southern Afghanistan, the government said yesterday -- the latest bloodshed in an insurgency that has seen a recent spate of attacks.

The number of fatalities is believed to be among the biggest suffered in a single attack by the fledgling Afghan police force, which was formed in late 2001.

The policemen, including a provincial director, were ambushed late on Monday while traveling on a remote valley road in Helmand province to an event to introduce a newly appointed district police chief, the interior ministry said.

"Eighteen police, including the Helmand province police director Amanullah Khan, were martyred last night in an ambush," spokesman Yousuf Stanizai said. Another four policemen were wounded in the attack.

Stanizai blamed the attack on "enemies of peace," a term Afghan officials use to refer to insurgents from the ousted Taliban government believed to behind almost all of the daily attacks in southern Afghanistan.

"The exchange of fire between the police and the enemies went on for several hours, up to about 1am in the morning," he said.

In a separate incident late on Monday, four Russian-made rockets were fired on Kandahar city in adjacent Kandahar province, which is also caught up in the insurgency, Stanizai said.

No one was hurt by the rockets, one of which landed near the headquarters of a foreign-run reconstruction team.

The Taliban, which imposed a hardline version of Islam on Afghanistan when they took control of most of the country in 1996, was born in southern Kandahar.

The city has been the focus of recent attacks linked to the Taliban, who launched an insurgency after they were removed from power in a US-led campaign in late 2001 after they had failed to hand over the fugitive al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

In the past week there have been four confirmed suicide attacks in and around Kandahar, two of them targeted at foreign nationals.

In one on Monday a former mujahidin commander allied to the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and another person was killed, along with the suicide bomber, Stanizai said yesterday.

Nine people were wounded and two were in critical condition, he said.

In another attack on Monday, a suicide bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body when confronted by police. No one else was hurt, officials said.

On Wednesday last week another suicide bomber attacked a Canadian patrol; he and an Afghan child were killed.

And on Sunday a suicide bomber rammed himself into a convoy from the British embassy, wounding four British private security guards.

The attacks have added to concern that the insurgents are adopting Iraq-style terrorist techniques as they try to bring down the Afghan government.

Officials are however keen to dismiss the Taliban's capacity.

"They cannot launch organized attacks and they cannot fight in fronts. That is why they carry out suicide attacks which illustrates their weakness," Stanizai said.

"Sometimes the rate of incidents is high and sometimes there is a decrease. It shows the desperation of the enemies of Afghanistan," presidential spokesman Karim Rahimi said.

The violence has focused on southern and eastern Afghanistan, where a US-led coalition force of about 20,000 soldiers is working with Afghan security forces to hunt down the militants.

In a swoop in southern Zabul province on Monday, security forces arrested a fighter from Chechnya and another from Pakistan, the defense ministry said.

Foreign fighters captured in rugged Afghanistan are usually believed to belong to the al-Qaeda network that was sheltered by the ousted Taliban regime.
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