KANDAHAR: The Taliban beheaded two boys aged 10 and 16 as a warning to villagers not to cooperate with the Afghan government, local officials said.

The boys, named Khan and Hameedullah, had travelled to Afghan army and police checkpoints near their home in the southern province of Kandahar, scrounging for leftover food to bring to their families, the officials said.

“The boys were on their way back ... when they were stopped by Taliban insurgents who beheaded them,” the chief of Zhari district, Jamal Agha, said. “Both of them were innocent children and had nothing to do with government or foreigners.”

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said the group was not involved in the boys’ killings.

The Kandahar governor’s spokesman, Javid Faisal, said the incident occurred on Sunday. Several hours later their bodies and severed heads were left in their village, he said.

In July last year in the same district, a 16-year-old boy accused by the Taliban of spying for the government was beheaded and skinned. The next month, a girl aged six and a boy of 12 were kidnapped and beheaded in separate incidents in Kandahar and the east of the country.

Also on Monday, six militants with suicide vests and heavy guns attacked a government compound in the provincial centre of Zabul, wounding at least 18 people.

Meanwhile, seven Taliban armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns launched a rare assault on Nato’s operational headquarters at the military section of Kabul’s international airport on Monday. All seven militants were killed.

Their failed attack showed that despite an asphyxiating security blanket around the capital, Afghanistan’s insurgency is far from defeated after nearly 12 years of war, and militants can still menace the capital.—Agencies