British and Afghan forces attack Taliban troops

British and Afghan forces attacked Taliban strongholds today after repelling a brazen insurgent attack on a police headquarters a day earlier in a southern Afghan town, killing at least 19 militants, the governor’s spokesman said.

Some 200 militants, driving four-wheel drive vehicles, poured into the Helmand provincial town of Nawzad around noon yesterday and set up positions around a police compound where Afghan soldiers and police, along with British troops, were based, spokesman Ghulam Muhiddin said.

“The Taliban surrounded this area, including a nearby bazaar, and told all their shopkeepers to leave before attacking the compound with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades,” Muhiddin said.

British spokesman Capt Drew Gibson said coalition aircraft dropped two 500 pound bombs on two Taliban targets in Nawzad, including a machine-gun position that was destroyed.

Gibson had no details on militant casualties, but Muhiddin said coalition air raids yesterday killed 12 militants travelling in a vehicle and another seven near the compound.

“There has been continued small-arms fire and RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attacks this morning in the same area,” he said.

The attack was one of the largest since a March 29 Taliban raid on a coalition base in Helmand’s Sangin district that left more than 30 militants and a US and Canadian soldier dead.

“We have gone right into the Taliban’s territory and reduced their freedom of movement and that has provoked a reaction,” Gibson said. “When you rattle cages, you are going to get a reaction.”

Coalition forces are in the midst of a large-scale anti-Taliban offensive across southern Afghanistan. More than 10,000 US, Canadian, British and Afghan troops are trying to crush the deadliest spike of Taliban-led violence since the hard-line regime was toppled in 2001.

More than 700 people, mainly insurgents, have been killed since coalition forces began the offensive in mid-May. More than 20 coalition soldiers have died in the same time.

Coalition forces have been entering volatile southern regions where Taliban militants have long faced little resistance. The operation comes ahead of Nato’s scheduled assumption of control of military operations from the United States across the south.

Militants ambushed US-led forces with RPG and small-arms fire last night in Kunar province’s Pech River Valley and slightly wounded two soldiers, said military spokesperson Lt Tamara Lawrence.

In southern Zabul province, three Afghan border guards were killed in a clash yesterday with armed tribesmen crossing from Pakistan, border guard chief Jailani Khan said today.

Armed men in a convoy of cars carrying about 200 members of Shamalzai district’s Nasser tribe had crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan and fired at border guards trying to stop them, said border guard chief Jailani Khan.

Tribesmen in the region are routinely armed and regularly cross the Pashtun-dominated Afghan-Pakistan border, where support for the Taliban runs high.

Separately, a bomb rigged to a hand-powered tricycle for the disabled exploded and wounded four people inside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif this morning, said local police official Nasseruddin Hamdad. Bombings in northern Afghanistan have been rare compared to the south, where Taliban activity is at its highest.

In the capital, Kabul, police arrested an Afghan man trying to plant a bomb outside the Information and Culture Ministry building, said Ali Shah Paktiawal, Kabul’s criminal police director.