{"id":40159,"date":"2019-07-18T19:22:43","date_gmt":"2019-07-18T19:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=40159"},"modified":"2019-07-18T19:22:43","modified_gmt":"2019-07-18T19:22:43","slug":"at-least-11-killed-in-taliban-attack-on-afghan-police-hq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=40159","title":{"rendered":"At least 11 killed in Taliban attack on Afghan police HQ"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

At least 11 people have been killed and scores more wounded after the Taliban<\/a>\u00a0attacked a police headquarters in the southern\u00a0Afghanistan<\/a>‘s\u00a0Kandahar city, officials and the armed group said.<\/p>\n

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi on Thursday said the afternoon attack in Afghanistan’s second-largest city started with a car bomb, then saw gunmen storm the police compound.<\/p>\n

“A number of mujahideen equipped with heavy and small arms breached the headquarters and launched their operations inside,” he said.<\/p>\n

Baheer Ahmadi, the Kandahar governor’s spokesman, said in a statement that 11 people were killed in the attack, including nine civilians and two police officers, while another 89 – including women and children – were wounded.<\/p>\n

Two Taliban attackers blew themselves up and six others were shot dead by the security forces, officials said<\/span><\/p>\n

Hayatullah Hayat, the provincial governor for Kandahar, said Afghan security forces had launched a “clean-up operation” to see if any attackers were remaining.<\/p>\n

“The fighting is over now. Some vehicles were burned. Now the Afghan army and US helicopters are hovering in the area,” police chief Tadin Khan told AFP news agency.<\/p>\n

Pictures on social media showed a huge plume of smoke rising over Kandahar, and Hayat said about six trucks carrying commercial goods had burned.<\/p>\n

Kandahar is the former seat of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until their removal by a US-led coalition in 2001. Since then, Taliban fighters have been fighting US and allied forces, demanding the departure of all foreign troops from Afghan soil.<\/p>\n

Attacks amid peace talks<\/h2>\n

The assault came amid a series of peace talks between the United States<\/a> and the Taliban that both sides say are making progress, but which so far have yielded no reduction in violence in the gruelling Afghan conflict.<\/p>\n

US officials and the Taliban have been discussing a peace deal since late last year. Earlier this month, a high-profile intra-Afghan dialogue<\/a> to find an end to the 18-year war was also held in Qatar.<\/p>\n

But despite the peace talks, the level of violence has not fallen off, with Afghan fighters and the Taliban still suffering daily losses.<\/p>\n

The Kandahar attack came a day after two Afghan soldiers – who were believed to be Taliban operatives – fatally shot an Afghan colonel in Ghazni province<\/span><\/p>\n

Also on Wednesday, at least 20 Afghan special forces commandos were killed in a Taliban ambush in western Afghanistan’s Abkamari district in Badghis province, a known Taliban hot spot.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, four Afghan security forces were killed<\/a> in Qala-e-Naw, the capital of Badghis province, when Taliban fighters attacked a hotel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At least 11 people have been killed and scores more wounded after the Taliban\u00a0attacked a police headquarters in the southern\u00a0Afghanistan’s\u00a0Kandahar city, officials and the armed group said. Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi on Thursday said the afternoon attack in Afghanistan’s second-largest city started with a car bomb, then saw gunmen storm the police compound. “A…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":40160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40159","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\/40159","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=40159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}