KABUL, Afghanistan – About 100 Taliban fighters on motorcycles
attacked a northern Afghan village that was working to join the
government-sponsored local police program against the insurgency,
killing one villager, police said Wednesday. An ensuing battle also
left 17 militants dead.
The Tuesday evening
attack sparked a gunfight that raged intensely for two hours and then
continued with sporadic shooting until just before dawn on Wednesday,
said Abdul Aziz Ghyrat, the police chief for Jawzjan province.
"They
targeted Abduraman village. The people there planned to join the local
police and the Taliban had heard about this plan," Ghyrat said.
The
Afghan Local Police, or ALP, is a controversial new program that
encourages villages to select a group of local men to be trained and
equipped by the Afghan government to fight the Taliban. Its American
and Afghan backers argue that the force is needed to defend areas that
are under threat from the Taliban but don't have a strong formal police
presence.
Critics, however, say the program essentially funds private militias.
The
villagers in Abduraman fought the attackers themselves until
reinforcements arrived in the form of Afghan police, army and NATO air
support, Ghyrat said.
At the end of the
fighting, one villager and 17 militants were dead, he said. Among the
dead militants was a local Taliban commander who had planned bombings
and attacks in the region, he added.
Elsewhere,
calm returned Wednesday to an area of Nuristan province in eastern
Afghanistan where some 400 insurgents attacked police outposts a day
earlier.
Mohammed Zareen, a spokesman for the
Nuristan government, said violence ended late Tuesday after police sent
150 reinforcements to the area. He said that the militants had fired
down from the mountains with rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns.
"It's
not like a face to face gunbattle. They occupied some mountaintops and
used heavy weapons," Zareen explained. He said four militants had been
killed in Tuesday's firefight, but no police officers.
Meanwhile,
NATO said a bomb killed a coalition service member in eastern
Afghanistan on Tuesday. The military alliance did not provide further
details on the deceased, in line with a policy of waiting for national
authorities to release the information. AP
