KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, 24 September 2005 — Ten Taleban and an Afghan soldier were killed in an operation to arrest a top Taleban commander in southern Afghanistan, a governor and the US military said yesterday. A soldier from the US-led coalition that has been in Afghanistan since the force helped remove the Taleban from power in late 2001 was also wounded in the operation Thursday in Uruzgan province, the US military said.
Coalition and Afghan troops came under attack by up to 20 “enemy firing small arms, heavy machine guns, mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades,” the US military said in a statement. “Coalition and US close air support and US attack helicopters arrived at the scene, blasting enemy positions killing 10 enemy combatants,” it said.
Uruzgan Governor Jan Mohammed Khan told AFP the military operation was launched after a tip-off that the man considered a military chief of the Taleban, Dadullah, was hiding out in the province’s Charchino district. “We had reports that Dadullah was hiding in the area and we launched an operation but we faced Taleban resistance and the fighting broke out,” he said. “There might have been over 10 Taleban killed but we have at least four bodies with us,” he said.
A purported spokesman for the Taleban said six of its fighters were killed. Spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi also claimed that eight US and 10 Afghan soldiers were killed, but this was not confirmed by the US military. The battle, in a known hotbed of militants from the ousted Taleban, is the first major clash since Afghanistan held its first parliamentary elections for more than 30 years at the weekend.
In other violence, police said suspected Taleban gunmen had killed seven Afghan musicians traveling home from a wedding. Well-known ethnic Turkmen singer Quarab Nazar was among the dead in the attack on Wednesday in the northwestern province of Jozjan, police officer Ibrahim Sharwal said.
The attack on a road in the northwestern province of Jozjan is the most serious violence since the elections last Sunday. “All seven have perished,” said Jozjan police official Ibrahim Sharwal. The attackers sprayed the musicians’ vehicle with bullets on Wednesday as they traveled home from a wedding the previous night. Sharwal ruled out robbery as a motive.
Election officials said yesterday they had quarantined several boxes of votes to investigate complaints of rigging. Candidates in Kandahar alleged some boxes had been stuffed with ballots after polling booths closed, and that some men used women’s voting cards to vote twice. The ballot boxes were sealed until the complaints could be investigated, election official Abdul Qahir Wasifi told AFP. “We have a number of boxes in quarantine and later on it will be known if these complaints were true or not,” said Wasifi, from the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) that organized the poll.
