Taliban insurgents attacked a district government headquarters in violence-plagued southern Afghanistan early on Saturday, sparking a battle that left seven police and five rebels dead, a local police official said.
At least six other police officers were wounded in three hours of fighting that erupted when insurgents attacked the compound in the Nazarjusth district of Helmand province hours before dawn, district police chief Haji Bahadur Khan said.
Some of the attackers may have been wounded, but they fled after the fighting and have not been found, Khan said. He said the district administration compound and four police vehicles were damaged in the fighting, in which both sides used machine guns, rockets and Kalashnikovs.
Taliban-led insurgents have targeted police, Afghan army and United States-led coalition forces in the deadliest militant violence since the ouster of the Taliban from power by an American-led military campaign in 2001.
Much of the violence is in the south, where the US-led forces are also on the offensive.
The persistent fighting comes ahead of an expansion of Nato-led peacekeeping operations to the south next year. The planned deployment of 6 000 mostly European and Canadian troops, announced on Thursday, will free up US forces for counter-insurgency operations and likely lead to a reduction in US troop numbers in Afghanistan.
But there are fears within Nato that the peacekeepers, already targeted in sporadic attacks in the relatively benign north and west, may be drawn into the fight against insurgents in southern Afghanistan. — Sapa-AP