KABUL (AFP) — Militants killed four policemen in an attack on a security post overnight while more than a dozen Taliban-linked rebels including two mullahs preparing a bomb in a mosque also died, authorities said Monday.
Some of the dozens of Taliban who attacked police in the central province of Ghazni were slain in a battle that lasted about an hour, provincial government spokesman Ismail Jahangir told AFP.
The Zana Khan district police chief was one of the four policemen who died, he said. "A big number of Taliban have also been killed, but we don't know exactly how many," Jahangir said.
A spokesman for the Taliban movement, Zabihullah Mujahed, confirmed that fighters with his group had carried out the attack but claimed they had not suffered casualties.
The US military announced meanwhile it had killed "several" militants elsewhere in Ghazni, a once quiet province that has seen a steep rise in Taliban activity in the past year.
In Paktika province, which adjoins Ghazni, two men were killed when a waistcoat they were packing with bombs for use in a suicide attack exploded, the government said.
"Two mullahs (prayer leaders) were killed when a suicide vest they were building went off prematurely," the interior ministry's Zemarai Bashary said.
The pair were in a mosque near the border with Pakistan.
The interior ministry announced separately that 11 Taliban-linked insurgents were killed in operations by police in Uruzgan, another troubled province in southern Afghanistan.
Two others died when a mine they were trying to plant in a road went off in the southern province of Kandahar, said police commander Abdul Raziq.
Unrest linked to the insurgency has increased every year since the Taliban were forced out in a US-led invasion in late 2001 for harbouring Al-Qaeda.
This year, about 800 Afghan security force personnel and around 150 international troops have lost their lives in insurgency-linked unrest, according to various official estimates.
There are no official figures for the number of rebels killed, while many civilians have also died.
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