Militant attacks claim 14 Afghan security personnel
A roadside bomb leaves 11 troops dead in Badakhshan, while extremists ambush a police checkpoint in Kabul killing 3 police officers after an hour-long battle
Two separate militant attacks killed 14 Afghan security personnel on Saturday in the northeastern Badakhshan province and the capital of Kabul, officials said.
A roadside bomb killed 11 security force members in Badakhshan when it tore through a security vehicle responding to attacks on checkpoints in Khash district.
Sanaullah Rohani, spokesman for Badakhshan’s provincial police chief, said a local commander was among the dead, and that four militants were killed in the fighting.
An hour-long gunbattle also erupted in Kabul’s Gul Dara district when insurgents attacked a police checkpoint, killing three police officers, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian.
Both Afghan officials said the Taliban had carried out the attacks, although no one immediately claimed responsibility.
The Taliban on Saturday claimed an attack a day earlier that killed 10 policemen in the southern Zabul province.
Afghan government officials said the Taliban ambushed an Afghan police convoy on Friday after setting off a roadside bomb. US forces had carried out two sets of airstrikes on Friday against the Taliban in western and southern Afghanistan.
These were the first US strikes following a brief cease-fire declared by the insurgents for the Holy Month of Ramadan.
Afghanistan is running out of hospital beds as suspected cases of coronavirus surge, officials said on Saturday, warning “there is a disaster coming” in the impoverished country.
Afghan health authorities reported 761 new positive cases of COVID-19 over the past 24 hours, taking the total number of confirmed infections to 19,551.
“Our (hospital) beds are almost full, we won’t have any more capacity very soon,” Health Minister Ahmad Jawad Osmani told reporters.
Officials said the number of cases were more than expected, including in the capital Kabul, the epicentre of the disease.
“There is a disaster coming,” said Kabul governor Mohammad Yakub Haidary at a joint press conference with the health minister.
He said in Kabul alone there could be a million people infected with the deadly virus. So far there have been 327 confirmed deaths in the country.
“We have reports of increasing suspected deaths, people burying dead bodies at night,” Haidary said.
“We fill 10-15 ambulances of dead people every day.”
The minister said that from Sunday the authorities will strictly impose measures like wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing for the next three months in order to curb the spread of the virus.
The uptick in fighting comes as US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad embarked on a new round of diplomatic trips, according to a US State Department statement on Friday.
Since the signing of a Us-taliban peace agreement at the end of February, US forces have only once before announced a strike against the Taliban, in defense of Afghan forces.
The Us-taliban agreement was signed to allow American soldiers to return home, ending America’s longest military engagement.
The deal also calls for Afghans in Kabul and the Taliban to start negotiations to decide the country’s future.
Those negotiations have been delayed because of political feuding between Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani and his rival in last year’s presidential polls, Abdullah Abdullah.
The virus’s spread has surged amid a nationwide lockdown that residents have largely ignored, with many daily wage earners taking their chances with the disease rather than lose a day’s work.
Experts say that Afghanistan is able to test only about 20 per cent of its daily suspected coronavirus cases.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a statement on Tuesday that “between 80 to 90 percent of potential cases are not being tested,” citing figures provided to them by the health ministry which said between 10,000 and 20,000 samples were being received per day.
The charity warned that Afghanistan was on the brink of a health crisis after confirmed cases spiked by 684 percent in May.