Fighting has escalated in eastern Afghanistan as Afghan and coalition forces step up their attacks on insurgents along the Pakistan border and militants retaliate with attacks on pro-government forces, including a bomb blast yesterday that killed three Afghan policemen.
Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a spokesman for the governor of Nangarhar Province, said the three policemen were killed by a bomb that was placed on a bus.
The bus was transporting Afghan policemen and trainees to a training academy in the provincial capital of Jalalabad. Six others on the bus were wounded in the explosion, Abdulzai said.
Afghanistan’s spring fighting season is expected to be in full force by the end of this month.
Before winter set in, tens of thousands of US and NATO reinforcements routed the Taliban from their strongholds, captured leading figures and destroyed weapons caches. The militants responded with high-profile attacks across the nation.
What remains unknown is how strong the Taliban will prove to be as the fighting gears up in what could be a defining year in the nearly decade-old war.
In other incidents in the east, two Afghan men were killed and four other people — three women and a child — were wounded yesterday when their van struck a roadside mine in Dih Yak District, Ghazni Province, said Sher Khan Yousefzai, the top local official in neighboring Andar District.
A French soldier was killed and nine wounded when their armored vehicle struck a road side bomb on Wednesday in Kapisa Province, the French defense ministry said.
Also, 17 insurgents, including foreign fighters, were killed on Tuesday in Kunar Province by Afghan and coalition forces searching for a senior leader of the al-Qaeda network, NATO said late on Wednesday.
The al-Qaeda leader commanded insurgents and directed the purchase of equipment used to attack pro-government forces in the border region, the coalition said.
NATO also said a Haqqani operator was captured on Wednesday in Tere Zayi District of Khost Province, and that several suspected insurgents were detained in the provincial capital of Khost. It said the individuals had been conducting military training and developing a compound linked to al-Qaeda leaders based in Pakistan.
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