As NATO troops exert pressure on Taliban forces in southern Afghan-istan, militants have regrouped in western provinces and ignited violence that has killed a dozen people in two days, officials said on Thursday.
Afghan and NATO forces fear that Farah province, which borders Iran, could become a Taliban sanctuary if military power isn't used to crush the militant threat quickly. Farah is a predominantly Pashtun area where people have ethnic links to the Taliban militia.
US-led and NATO forces have been battling Taliban and allied militants this year in Afghanistan's worst spate of violence since the American-led invasion that toppled the hard-line regime in 2001 for harboring al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
PHOTO: AFP
Up to 200 Taliban fighters in dozens of pickup trucks poured into the Farah town of Bakwa early on Thursday, surrounding a police compound and firing rocket-propelled grenades at policemen, said Major General Sayed Agha Saqeb, the provincial police chief.
Taliban fighters took over the compound for an hour before police reinforcements drove them off into the desert darkness. Two militants were killed and two wounded, while two police also died and two were wounded, Saqeb said.
Meanwhile, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan said on Thursday that the Taliban should not be blamed for all the violence in the country, which was also being perpetrated by al-Qaeda remnants and criminals.
"There is a tendency to characterize all of the violence in Afghanistan as the resurgence of the Taliban," said US General James Jones, the alliance's supreme allied commander in Europe. "This is inaccurate. It doesn't capture the nature of the problem."
He said the violence had other causes, including "the strong presence of the drug cartels which have their own infrastructure, their own export system, their own security system."
Addressing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna, Jones said: "I would caution that we should not make the Taliban 10 feet tall."
The new weapons being used were available to "all of the actors, not just the Taliban", he said.
Military commanders believe a minority of fighters attacking British troops in Helmand Province, and mainly Canadian troops in neighborring Kandahar Province, are hardcore Taliban. The majority, they suggest, are local people paid by the Taliban who offer significantly more -- about US$10 a day -- than the money paid to recruits to the Afghan army.
Commanders are also concerned about what they call Taliban propaganda that NATO troops are occupying the country and threatening local livelihoods.
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