Kabul - More than two dozen Taliban and three police
officers were killed in a clash in northern Afghanistan and a suicide
bombing and US-led coalition airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan,
officials said Tuesday.
Officials in the Baghlan province said a clash that lasted several
hours late Monday in the Baghlan-e-Markazi district inflicted heavy
casualties on the Taliban.
The police started an operation to clear the Kokchinar area of
militants and a clash between the two sides started as soon as the
police entered the area, provincial police chief Abdul Rahman
Saeedkhili said.
He said 15 Taliban and two police officers were killed in the
fighting and the area was cleared of the militants.
However, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the militant
group killed three police in the fighting and the militants suffered
no casualties.
Afghanistan's relatively stable north has been the scene of
increasing Taliban attacks in recent weeks as the country moves
closer to the second presidential election in its history.
Elsewhere, a suicide bomber wearing woman's clothing detonated
himself at a border checkpoint at a crossing between Afghanistan and
Pakistan, killing one police officer and a child and wounding several
other people.
The chief of the border police in the Eastern Zone, Zaman Mamozai,
said the bomber detonated the explosives attached to his body as the
border police were trying to frisk him while crossing the border from
Pakistan into Afghanistan in Torkham.
Four police and five civilians were also wounded in the bombing,
he said.
Meanwhile, the US military said in a statement Tuesday that more
than a dozen Taliban from the Haqqani group were killed overnight in
the western parts of the south-eastern province of Khost bordering
Pakistan.
Coalition forces planned and coordinated the airstrikes when
intelligence sources indicated militant activity in the rugged
location earlier in the day, the statement said.
'Coalition force aircraft were called in and destroyed a pair of
command bunkers, killing more than a dozen militants,' the statement
added.
Afghanistan's summer, which has just begun, has usually been the
season in which the fiercest fighting takes place between the Taliban
and foreign and Afghan forces since 2006.
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