KABUL, Aug 10: Eight policemen and 12 Taliban died in a clash in southern Afghanistan, and a bomb injured seven civilians near a meeting with a top US general, officials said on Thursday.
The fire fight came after insurgents ambushed a police patrol in Kandahar province’s volatile Panjwayi district on Wednesday, provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi told AFP.
Another seven policemen and nine rebels were wounded, he said.
Panjwayi is a known stronghold of the Taliban, the militia that was toppled from power by US-led forces in 2001 but which is now leading an increasingly bloody insurgency.
A suicide car bomber blew himself up in a bazaar in Panjwayi on Aug 3, killing 21 civilians and injuring several Nato soldiers in a passing convoy in one of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan this year.
The district, some 30 kilometres west of Kandahar, was the scene of fierce clashes between the coalition and Taliban troops in mid-May. Around 34 civilians also died when US-led warplanes bombed a village in Panjwayi.
Separately on Thursday, seven civilians, including an elderly woman, were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded in the centre of the eastern city of Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, police said.
Earlier, witnesses had said that the explosion was from a rocket.
Provincial police spokesman Ghafoor Khan said the bomb blast was the work of “enemies of Afghanistan” – official Afghan jargon for the Taliban and their allies.
The bomb exploded 800 metres away from the provincial governor’s house where the top US military commander in Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry, was meeting local officials, police said.
The US-led coalition, said Mr Eikenberry, was not in any danger.
“The explosion was not anywhere near where the general was. He was not the target,” a coalition spokesperson in Kabul said.
More than 1,000 people, many of them militants, have died this year in Afghanistan’s worst violence for five years. Dozens of foreign troops have also been killed.
Nine Nato soldiers have been killed since the force took over command of southern Afghan-istan on July 31 from the US-led coalition. The coalition is still in command in the east of the country.—AFP
