Southern Afghanistan has seen a fierce battle between as Taleban fighters and police, with officials saying more than 40 people were killed. The fighting erupted in Helmand province where thousands of British troops are currently deployed. Violence also broke out earlier in Kandahar, leaving 18 militants and a female Canadian soldier dead. The attacks came as Canada's parliament narrowly voted to extend the country's combat mission until 2009. A suicide bomber also attacked a convoy of vehicles in the western city of Herat on Thursday, police said, killing himself and an American national.
"This morning around 0930 a suicide attacker drove his car in to a passing American convoy of supply trucks in the city of Herat," police chief Gen Aayub Salangi told the BBC, adding that one vehicle had been completely destroyed.
The fighting in Helmand began on Wednesday afternoon. A senior security official told the BBC that Taleban commanders contacted the police and taunted them that they had taken control of the town of Musa Qala.
| "Nah nah-nah nah nah!" |
"It was the biggest attack [in Helmand] since the fall of the Taleban," provincial governor Amir Mohammad Akhundzada told Reuters news agency.
| I guess the Afghan cops don't take to being taunted. Good for them. |
UPDATE: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- Some of the fiercest violence since the Taliban's 2001 ouster erupted across Afghanistan, with coalition forces engaging in multiple firefights, two suicide car bombs and a massive rebel assault on a small village. Up to 105 people were killed. The estimates of Taliban fighters and suicide bombers killed ranged up to 87, with 14 Afghan police, an American civilian, an Afghan civilian and a Canadian soldier also killed in the multiple attacks late Wednesday and Thursday, officials said.
An assault by hundreds of enemy fighters on a small southern town was one of the largest attacks by militants since 2001 and marked another escalation in the campaign by supporters of the former Taliban regime to challenge the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai. The attack late Wednesday and early Thursday on a police and government headquarters in the town of Musa Qala in Helmand province sparked eight hours of clashes with security forces. The Interior Ministry said about 40 militants were killed, though police said they had retrieved only 14 bodies. About a dozen police were killed and five wounded in the attack some 95 miles northwest of Kandahar, said deputy governor Amir Mohammed Akhunzaba.