Taliban tactics 'similar to Hezbollah' says Nato

A senior Nato official today likened the tactics of Taliban militants who hide among civilians in Afghanistan to those of Hezbollah in Lebanon, as US and Afghan forces seized bomb-making materials and killed a suspected al-Qaida operative in a raid on a house.

Meanwhile, insurgents killed six police, including a new local police chief, and wounded four other officers in the country’s west.

Taliban-led militants have escalated attacks in recent months, sparking the deadliest fighting in Afghanistan since the hard-line regime was ousted in the US-led invasion in late 2001.

Most of the violence has taken place in volatile southern provinces where a Nato-led force took control of security from the American-run coalition on August 1.

Militants have used suicide bombings, rocket attacks and ambushes with an intensity that has surprised Afghan and Western officials.

Hikmet Cetin, Nato’s senior civil representative in Afghanistan, said the Taliban’s method of mixing in with local civilian populations after attacks was a similar ploy used by Hezbollah and militants in Turkey, where troops are fighting separatist Kurdish guerrillas in that country’s south east.

“This kind of strategy is very, very difficult not only for Nato in Afghanistan but also in other parts of the world,” Cetin told a press conference in the capital, Kabul.

“You can see Lebanon now, you can see in Palestine and you can see my own country, Turkey,” he added.

Afghan and US troops killed one al-Qaida suspect and detained 13 others in a raid on eastern Afghanistan’s Khost province today, seizing numerous detonators and other bomb-making material, said Col. Tom Collins, the chief US military spokesman.

The troops asked people inside the compound in the village of Yaqubi to surrender. Most did, but a militant disguised as a woman resisted arrest and was shot dead, Collins said.

More than 60 women and children were inside the compound at the time of the operation, he added.

Meanwhile, militants fatally shot a new local police chief and five other officers in an ambush on a desert road in the volatile Dalaram district of Farah province, said Gen. Sayed Aqa Saqib, the provincial police chief.

Taliban fighters have moved into the district after fleeing Nato-led military operations in southern Helmand province.

Meanwhile Afghan soldiers killed a policeman during an armed clash following a car crash in northern Afghanistan.

Five soldiers were arrested after the incident in Jabalussaraj district of the northern Parwan province, said Gen. Abdul Rahman Sayidkhail, the province’s police chief.

Vehicles driven separately by the police and army crashed, sparking an argument and a gun battle, during which soldiers shot the policeman dead, Sayidkhail said.