KABUL, 4 October 2005 — Afghan government troops killed 31 insurgents in weekend fighting in southeastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, a Defense Ministry spokesman said yesterday. Twenty-eight militants were killed on Sunday night after they attacked an army position in the Angor Ada area of Paktika province, Zahir Azimi said.
Eight government troops were wounded in more than four hours of fighting in which both sides used heavy machineguns and rockets, he said. “As a result of our counterattack, 28 enemy bodies have been recovered,” Azimi said. Three more militants were killed early on Sunday in a separate clash in Paktika province, Azimi said.
A spokesman for the US military, which has a base in the area, said US forces were not involved. A Taleban spokesman denied the heavy casualties and said only three of their fighters had been wounded. “They’re lying,” the Taleban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. “We were the attackers and we killed 11 Afghan soldiers. Only three Taleban were injured,” he said.
Meanwhile, thousands of people marched through Afghanistan’s capital and a key northern city yesterday as protests against the assassination of a leading candidate in last month’s elections spread across the country. Unidentified attackers gunned down Ashraf Ramazan and his guard a week ago in northern Mazar-e-Sharif. The ethnic Hazara leader was running third in the Balkh province race for a parliamentary seat after the Sept. 18 vote.
Around 2,000 people, most of them Hazaras, took to the streets of Kabul, blaming the killing on the rival ethnic Tajik administration of Mazar-e-Sharif and demanding they be sacked and brought to justice, witnesses said. “We will continue our peaceful demonstration until the government responds to our demands. If needed, we will also go on hunger strike,” protester Murad Ali told AFP.
The marchers also demanded that votes cast for Ramazan be given to his brother so he could take the assassinated candidate’s place in war-shattered Afghanistan’s new national assembly.
