Afghan security personnel investigate the scene following an explosion from a magnetic bomb attached to a civilian car in Kabul on Tuesday. At least two civilians were injured by the blast in the Afghan capital, officials said.
Reuters/Kabul
Taliban fighters overwhelmed an Afghan police checkpoint in a key province bordering the capital, killing six policemen on Tuesday as insurgents launch fierce attacks ahead of the withdrawal of foreign combat forces, an official said.
The bloody fighting season is testing the newly trained Afghan security forces' ability to battle the insurgency, which is determined to re-establish its strict Islamist state that was toppled 13 years ago in the US-led military intervention.
The Taliban attacked the police post in Logar province early on Tuesday morning and the Afghan government forces were unable to repel them, according to a local official.
Six policemen died in the battle in Baraki Barak district, located about 100 km southwest of Kabul, the capital, district governor Abdul Rahim Amini said.
The battle came a day after a Taliban ambush in the mountainous northern province of Sar-e-Pul killed 22 policemen and soldiers.
Most international troops will leave Afghanistan at the end of this year, winding up the combat phase of the mission that began with ousting the Taliban over the shelter they gave the Al-Qaeda planners of the September 11 attacks in the US.
About 12,000 foreign military personnel, including 9,800 US troops, are expected to stay on after 2014, to train and support Afghan forces continuing the fight against the Taliban.
UN agency to cut food rations for 1mn Afghans over funding
Funding shortfalls have forced the World Food Programme to cut rations for up to 1mn people in Afghanistan, a WFP official said, an early sign that aid money may dwindle as the international combat mission winds down.
The UN food assistance agency, which runs on donations from member countries, faces a gap of about $30mn for its programme in Afghanistan, country director Claude Jibidar told Reuters in an interview.
"We have had to cut down the rations of the people we are assisting, just so that we can buy some time, so we don't stop altogether," Jibidar said.
He said the cuts, to 1,500 calories a day from 2,100, would affect up to 1mn people, many of whom have had to flee their homes because of the escalating war between the Taliban insurgency and the Western-backed Afghan government.
For those displaced by the war, the prospect that food aid could stop is grim.
"If the food rations get stopped, we will die of hunger," said Bibi Fatima, an elderly woman who lives with eight family members in a mud hut on Kabul's eastern outskirts.
The family was forced to flee their home in Helmand, a southern province where fighting has been fierce, and they have no income except what Fatima's grandchildren bring in from begging on the streets.
She said she had received food from a UN agency in past winters, and was counting on help this coming season. "We don't have firewood and food to eat. If our children get sick, we have no money to treat them."
