At least 100 Afghan security forces killed

Kabul : At least 100 Afghan security forces have been killed as troops backed by US airpower struggled to push the Taliban from embattled Ghazni city, officials said yesterday, while residents reported food and medicine shortages four days after fighting began. The Afghan government said it had sent reinforcements to the strategic city, which lies barely two hours drive from Kabul on the main highway connecting the capital with the country’s south. US forces in Afghanistan said they had been conducting airstrikes daily since the fighting began. The assault, which the Taliban launched late Thursday, comes as the insurgents are under increasing pressure to join peace talks and highlights the difficulty of repelling their repeated attacks on urban centres crowded with civilians, with residents among the dead.

“About 100 security forces have lost their lives and between 20 and 30 civilians have been killed,” defence minister Tariq Shah Bahrami told a press conference in Kabul, offering the first high-level official casualty figure since the insurgents entered the city. He also said that 194 insurgents had been killed and 147 wounded. The Taliban swiftly responded, saying the government’s claims were “baseless” and that talks were “under way for their surrender”. Doctors were struggling to treat dozens of wounded at hospitals in the eastern provincial capital, where residents said insurgents roamed the streets. 

At a hospital in the city wounded people could be seen groaning in agony on stretchers, while uncovered wooden coffins filled with bodies were laid on the floor. A doctor in the hospital’s intensive care unit said they had received over 80 dead bodies as of Sunday and had treated more than 160 patients, many of whom were had been injured by gunshots or shrapnel.