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Exhausted Afghan security forces were surrounded on Friday by Taliban fighters in the capital of Afghanistan’s south-central province of Uruzgan, a day after fighting off a concerted push by the militants, officials said.
The Taliban attack, in one of the country’s top opium-producing areas, has exposed how thinly stretched Afghan security forces have become as they try to contain Islamist insurgents in other areas of the country.
A clash erupted Thursday afternoon between the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and the Mon National Liberation Army (MNLA) in Tae Chong village of Dawei District. The two ethnic armed groups both claim land in the area, also known as Tavoy, in Tenasserim Division.
“Members of the Karen National Union [KNU] came into the village,” Nai Win Hla, a spokesperson from the New Mon State Party (NMSP), told The Irrawaddy Friday.
Taliban terrorists claimed responsibility for two bomb blasts Monday near the Afghan Ministry of Defense in Kabul that killed nearly two dozen people.
Saleem Rasooli, head of Kabul hospitals, told CNN at least 24 people had been killed in the attack — which also injured 91 others.
Two bombs killed at least 13 people and wounded dozens outside a court complex in northwest Pakistan on Friday, a rescue official said, hours after militants killed two people in a Christian neighborhood in the same region.
Both attacks were claimed by Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, a breakaway Pakistani Taliban faction believed to be behind some of the past year’s deadliest attacks, including last month’s bombing of lawyers in the city of Quetta that killed 74 people.
Shan State Army-North troops on the front line in Shan State. (Photo: Kyaw Kha / The Irrawaddy)
The Burma Army and the Shan State Progress Party/Shan State Army-North (SSPP/SSA-N) clashed in northern Shan State on Sunday evening, just days before the start of the Union Peace Conference.
Fighting broke out as the Burma Army’s Light Infantry Battalions No. 33 and 147 marched toward the SSA-N’s Loilem outpost in Mongyang Township’s Tangyan village tract, but there were no casualties, said Major Sai Hsu, an SSPP/SSA-N spokesperson.