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Dozens die in clashes with Taliban

A battle between police and Taliban killed 20 suspected militants and two police officers in northwestern Afghanistan, while air strikes and clashes left another 27 militants dead in the south, officials said yesterday.

Militants attacked three separate police posts on Saturday in the Murghab district of Badghis Province, said provincial police chief General Mohammad Ayub Naizyar.

Police repelled the attack and sent reinforcements to the area, forcing the militants to withdraw, Naizyar said. The six-hour battle left 20 suspected insurgents and two policemen dead, he said, adding that the district is under government control.

There have been a number of attacks in the relatively peaceful north, but the southern and eastern provinces are the hardest hit by the insurgency.

In southern Zabul Province, NATO and Afghan troops clashed with militants and called in airstrikes, leaving 27 suspected Taliban insurgents dead in the district of Shinkay, said Defense Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi.

The operation followed intelligence reports of militant activity in the area, Azimi said. There were no reports of civilian casualties.

Britain's Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, said a British soldier died and four others were wounded on Saturday during a battle with militants in Helmand's Sangin district, the center of a major NATO operation against Taliban militants.

Taliban militants also fired rockets near a gathering attended by President Hamid Karzai in the Andar district of Ghazni Province yesterday, but no one was hurt, an official said.

The attack happened as Karzai was giving a speech to residents, an Afghan government official said on condition of anonymity.

The rockets missed their target and Karzai continued his speech, he said.

After a winter lull, there has been a sharp spike in clashes and other violence this spring in Afghanistan. Some 2,200 people, many of them insurgents, have died in insurgency-related violence this year, according to an Associated Press count based on numbers reported by the US, NATO, UN and Afghan officials.

Also in the south, more than 100 relatives and tribal elders attended the burial of former top Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in a US-led operation last month, said Mansoor Dadullah, the militia's new commander.

Mullah Dadullah, whose body was handed over to relatives this week by the Afghan government, was buried in the Zod Shar neighborhood of Kandahar, Mansoor Dadullah said.

The Taliban released four medical workers in exchange for Mullah Dadullah's body, which the government said it had buried in a secret location in Kandahar. The militants earlier beheaded a fifth medical worker and said they would kill the rest if the body wasn't released.

Mansoor Dadullah, who was named as his brother's replacement shortly after his death, said he is in touch with al-Qaeda's leadership in Afghanistan, and the two organizations share fighters.

Meanwhile, police on Saturday said that they had begun disarming hundreds of security guards who are working for a former interior ministry general accused of beating Afghanistan's attorney general.

But Din Mohammad Jora'at, the former interior ministry general, denied attorney general Abdul Jabar Sabet's claim that Jora'at had attacked and tried to kidnap him on Friday on the outskirts of Kabul.
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