The attack happened just before dawn when the police were asleep, Kunduz Gov. Mohammad Omar told reporters. One policeman was wounded and one managed to escape, he said, lowering his earlier death toll of nine. Residents said there were some casualties among civilians, but details were not immediately available.

The Taleban, largely active in their traditional bastion of support in the south and east, have increased attacks in recent months in some areas of the north despite the presence of around 150,000 foreign forces in the country.

Kunduz has been the focus of attacks in the north and insurgents are increasingly using it as a base to launch attacks elsewhere in the region. Early this month, a Taleban suicide bomber killed seven policemen in Kunduz. As a sign of their growing strength in the province, the Taleban publicly stoned to death a young woman and a man accused of an illicit affair.

President Hamid Karzai says the rising insecurity in Afghanistan is linked to the presence of training bases as well as sanctuaries for Taleban leaders in neighboring Pakistan. In a meeting on Thursday with Gen. James Mattis, new head of US military command for Iraq and Afghanistan, Karzai raised that issue, as he regularly does with US officials.

In the face of rising Taleban attacks, the top US Marine, Gen. James Conway, this week said Obama’s timeline to begin withdrawing troops had given a morale boost to the insurgents who believe they can wait out foreign forces.

Meanwhile, a NATO reconnaissance drone crashed in a Taleban stronghold in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, allowing insurgents to seize its camera, the coalition force said. The lightweight, medium-range spy aircraft went down after it lost engine power over the restive province of Kandahar, a known hotbed of the Taleban insurgency, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said. “The aircraft’s camera was not found and according to locals, is believed to have been recovered by insurgents,” ISAF said in a statement. The camera had no recording capability and was only used to transmit images, it added.