September 20, 2003	Saturday	Rajab 22, 1424

SHARAN (Afghanistan), Sept 19: Several dozen Taliban fighters escaped a siege by Afghan government troops in a madressa (religious school) with the help of locals in violence-wracked eastern Afghanistan, a police chief said on Friday.

“The local population provided them passage and they managed to flee on Thursday evening,” General Daulat Khan, chief of police in Paktika province, said.

The heavily-armed fighters had taken shelter in the madressa on Wednesday after attacking government buildings in the district of Wazakhwa, 60kms from the Pakistan border.

Daulat Khan said up to five Taliban commanders had already fled on motorbikes before the siege of the madressa in the nearby village of Karmadin.

During the siege local elders, clutching copies of the holy Quran, had urged the troops not to assault the madressa, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said.

Government troops in Urgun, 120kms northeast of Wazakhwa, were seen seeking instructions from authorities in Kabul on how to handle the siege.

Paktika, bordering Pakistan, is one of the main battlegrounds in an apparent resurgence by the Taliban and their supporters.

The US military, international aid agencies, and Afghan officials have noted an increase in armed attacks on aid workers and troops in recent months.

The CARE relief organization said this week that attacks on humanitarian workers had soared to one every two days, from one a month a year ago.

The upsurge in violence has forced aid agencies to abandon rebuilding and development projects in vast swathes of southern and eastern Afghanistan, placing the country’s post-war recovery at serious risk.

The US military, which has 10,000 troops in Afghanistan hunting down Taliban remnants still at large two years after their government was toppled, has said that the militia is trying to regain power.

Norway’s International Development Minister Hilde Frafjord Johnson warned at the end of a visit to Kabul that a lack of aid and development could drive disgruntled Afghans into the arms of insurgents.

“Aid can help people in the way that we can prevent them being recruited to insurgency, to faction fighting and to other insecurity measures,” Mr Johnson said.

US and Afghan troops have killed more than 100 suspected Taliban militants in a fierce offensive over the past three weeks in their mountainous hideouts in Zabul province, next to Paktika.

ROCKET FIRED: Four rockets were fired at a roadworks site along the Kabul-Kandahar highway, near the town of Ghazni, on Friday, but there were no casualties.

The rockets were aimed at facilities housing workers and equipment of private Turkish firm Mensel JV, which is in charge of rebuilding an 85-kilometre section of the road between the capital and Kandahar.

There were no casualties or damage from the rockets, according to the source.

Rebuilding of the highway is a major reconstruction project being undertaken by international donors and the Afghan government.

Private sub-contractors working on the road, under US construction firm Louis Berger, have suffered several attacks from insurgents and suspected Taliban fighters over the past month.

Four Afghan policemen were killed and another four kidnapped on Aug 31 some 100 kilometres north of Kandahar by armed men who attacked a workers’ camp. Several vehicles were also damaged.

A bomb also exploded on Wednesday near a US military convoy near Ghazni, but did not cause any casualties.

Around 1,000 policemen have been deployed by the interior ministry to help ensure security along the road, with assistance from US security firm USPI.

Four people were also killed in a bomb blast in Ghazni on Wednesday. The bomb, in a large plastic bag, had been hung on the door of the home of the Ghazni provincial police chief.

The attacks, which have also increasingly targeted aid workers and mine-clearing teams, are seen as part of a campaign by Taliban militants to destabilize President Hamid Karzai’s government by undermining reconstruction work. —AFP