Taliban militants stage simultaneous attacks on police checkpoints

TALIBAN fighters simultaneously attacked two police checkpoints on a southern Afghan highway, and up to 14 militants were killed or wounded in the ensuing gun battle, an official said yesterday.

In central Afghanistan, coalition and Afghan troops shot dead three insurgents.

The checkpoint attacks, on Saturday, came a day after heavy fighting in the southern province of Kandahar killed 41 militants and six policemen, police said, in the biggest battle in a recent spate of Taliban-led violence threatening this war-battered nation’s new democracy.

In neighbouring Zabul province late on Saturday, about 30 Taliban attacked police posts about a mile apart on the outskirts of Qalat district, 95 miles north-east of Kandahar city, Zabul police chief Ghulam Nabi Malakhail said.

The police were deployed at the posts to guard the main highway linking the capital, Kabul, with Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold.

The fighting lasted for about 30 minutes, and 14 militants were killed or wounded, said Mr Malakhail, who did not have an exact breakdown of the casualties. He said there were no police casualties.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Mohammed Yousaf, claimed rebels from his extremist movement attacked three police posts.

Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand and Zabul provinces are located in a swathe of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban have kept up a stubborn series of attacks against the government and US-led coalition forces hunting them.

On Saturday, suspected Taliban attacked coalition and Afghan army troops with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades in central Uruzgan province, sparking a battle that killed three attackers, the US military said in a statement.

No Afghan or coalition forces were wounded, it said.