Taliban Making Inroads into Inner Afghan Provinces

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, August 24, 2003

Taliban Making Inroads into Inner Afghan Provinces

Afghanistan's ousted Taliban is increasingly making their inroads into inner provinces of the country amid sporadic guerrilla attacks against government targets, analysts here said on Saturday.

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Afghanistan's ousted Taliban is increasingly making their inroads into inner provinces of the country amid sporadic guerrilla attacks against government targets, analysts here said on Saturday.

Indications show that the militia movement, which was driven out of power in late 2001 by a US-led military campaign, is regrouping across the Pakistan border and extending their presence from border areas to inside Afghanistan.

Important documents seized from a group of Taliban invaders by government troops in an earlier operation revealed that the guerrilla fighters crossed the border to launch attacks in Afghanistan after being trained in Pakistan, a provincial governor said on Saturday.

Four Taliban fighters were killed and nine others arrested in the huge operation on Friday afternoon in the central province of Urozgan, said Jan Mohammad Khan, governor of the province.

The government troops have recaptured some areas, including the administrative headquarters of Khas Urozgan district in the province, which were captured by some 300 Taliban fighters earlier in the week, he added.

The operation was launched in the mountainous district after the Taliban guerrilla fighters killed a local security commander and his bodyguard in an ambush on Wednesday.

Two government soldiers were also killed and another two wounded in the three-hour engagement between the two sides, Khan said.

"Along with the arrests, two rocket launchers, nine Klashinkov rifles and a lot of ammunitions were seized in the operation," the governor said, adding that the remaining Taliban escaped to mountains of a neighbor district.

An official of the Interior Ministry in Kabul told Xinhua that government troops have been sent from neighboring provinces to hunting down fugitive Taliban elements.

"The administrative headquarters of Khas Urozgan district is now under control by local government, and the Taliban fugitives are on the run," said Nabi Ahmad Zai, chief of staff of the ministry.

Holdout members of the Taliban militia movement, believed to be hiding in border areas across the Afghan-Pakistan border, have been waging a guerrilla war mainly in southern and southeastern border provinces.

But recent reports said that senior Taliban commanders, including a former foreign minister of the ousted regime, were traveling to some remote areas of northwestern Afghanistan to instigate anti-government insurgencies.

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