Militants kill 9 charity workers

Nine people who were working on a reconstruction project in the remote north of Afghanistan have been shot dead in an attack on a guesthouse, an official said.

The attack took place in the Zari district of Balkh province at 2am local time, when gunmen burst into the workers’ rooms as they slept, said Abdul Basset Ayni, director of the province’s rural development department.

Seven of the dead were workers and the other two were security guards, interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said on his official Twitter feed.

Balkh police spokesman Shir Jan Durrani said the workers were employed by the National Solidarity Programme, which oversees rural development projects across the country. All the dead were Afghanis, he added.

An investigation team has been sent to the area and the motivation and perpetrators of the attack are unknown, Durrani said.

Balkh has recently been beset by insurgent activity and a spike in violence since the Taliban launched its offensive in late April.

The deaths in Balkh come as a report concludes that the war in Afghanistan has killed almost 100,000 people, and wounded the same number, since the 2001 US-led invasion overthrew the Taliban regime and sparked an insurgency.

The study, called ‘Costs Of War’ and produced by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, looks at war-related deaths, injuries’ and displacement in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to last year, when international combat troops left Afghanistan.

Civilian and military deaths in both countries total almost 149,000 people killed, with 162,000 seriously wounded, said the report’s author, Neta Crawford.