{"id":21197,"date":"2018-11-05T14:24:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T14:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=21197"},"modified":"2018-11-05T14:24:17","modified_gmt":"2018-11-05T14:24:17","slug":"afghan-forces-killed-in-taliban-attack-on-ghanzi-checkpoint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=21197","title":{"rendered":"Afghan forces killed in Taliban attack on Ghanzi checkpoint"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A Taliban<\/a> attack on a checkpoint in the eastern province of Ghazni has killed at least 13 soldiers and policemen, officials said.<\/p>\n

Afghan reinforcements were dispatched to the site after Monday’s attack in Khogyani district – located on the main road between the capital, Kabul, and the Afghan south –\u00a0<\/span>but were repeatedly ambushed along the way.<\/p>\n

The checkpoint was part of a belt of strongholds built around Ghazni after the city was\u00a0briefly overrun<\/a>\u00a0by the Taliban in August in one of their biggest offensives in years.<\/p>\n

At the time, hundreds of people fled the city amid intense fighting between Afghan forces and the Taliban that killed about 120 members of the security forces and civilians.<\/p>\n

Arif Noori, spokesperson for the provincial governor in Ghazni, said that seven soldiers and six policemen were killed in Monday’s raid.<\/p>\n

According to Noori, six Taliban fighters were killed and more than 10 others wounded during a three-hour gun battle with Afghan forces after the initial attack.<\/p>\n

In a statement sent to the media, Taliban spokesperson\u00a0Zabihullah Mujahid said his group claimed responsibility for the raid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The joint army and police checkpoint was set up just two days ago in a strategic area to cut off a supply route for the Taliban but was now completely burned down and destroyed, Noori said.<\/p>\n

“Reinforcement were rushed to assist the forces under attack but they were ambushed by other Taliban fighters at least four times while on their way to the checkpoint,” said Noori.<\/p>\n

Ghazni is the only one out of 34 Afghan provinces where the country’s October parliamentary elections could not take place for security reasons.<\/p>\n

Voting there has been postponed for a year.<\/p>\n

A US watchdog agency said last week that the Afghan government was struggling to recover control of districts lost to the Taliban while casualties among security forces had reached record levels.<\/p>\n

The government had control or influence over 65 percent of the population but only 55.5 percent of Afghanistan’s 407 districts, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a report earlier this year.<\/p>\n

The latest phase of Afghanistan’s decades of war began in late 2001, when US-led troops overthrew the Taliban in response to the September 11 attacks that year on the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\n SOURCE:
\n Al Jazeera and news agencies<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Taliban attack on a checkpoint in the eastern province of Ghazni has killed at least 13 soldiers and policemen, officials said. Afghan reinforcements were dispatched to the site after Monday’s attack in Khogyani district – located on the main road between the capital, Kabul, and the Afghan south –\u00a0but were repeatedly ambushed along the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":21198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}