Ambushes, bomb blasts, and other incidents have left seven Afghans dead, including government officials, authorities said on Saturday. They also reported that security forces had killed 10 insurgents, taking the death toll to 17.In one attack, a district chief and his driver were killed on Saturday when a remote- controlled bomb exploded under their vehicle close to the border with Pakistan, Nangarhar province Governor Gul Agha Sherzai told AFP. Hours later, a senior member of the Nangarhar provincial council was shot dead by unknown gunmen in the remote Dara-i-Noor district, the official said.
The police killed a suspect and arrested another man in connection with the murder, the governor said, adding the motive was unknown. In an attack that was blamed on the Taliban, two police officers were killed in an ambush late on Friday as they were going to reinforce a police post that had come under attack, a provincial government spokesman said. The dead were the police chief of Laghman province's Qarghayi district, Abdul Aziz, and one of his men, provincial spokesman Sayed Ahmad reported.
The US-led coalition announced that a civilian man, shot by coalition troops at a checkpost in the eastern province of Khost, had died of his wounds. A woman and a child were also wounded on Friday when troops opened fire after their vehicle did not heed warnings to stop, it said. The Interior Ministry announced separately that Afghan and international security forces had killed 10 'enemies of peace and stability' in the southern province of Helmand on Friday.
Officials killed: Taliban gunmen fatally shot a provincial council member while a roadside bomb killed a second official in the same Afghan province on Saturday, part of a spate of violence that left 17 people dead across the country, officials said. The gunmen killed Qari Khan Mohammad, a member of Nangarhar's provincial council, as he was travelling toward the eastern city of Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar, said council head Fazel Hadi Muslimyar.
A roadside bomb, meanwhile, killed three people on Saturday in Nangarhar, including Mohammad Nahim, the chief of Goshta district, said provincial police chief spokesman Ghafoor Khan. Karzai condemned the attacks in a statement and blamed them on the 'enemies of Afghanistan'.
Afghan supply chain: President Barack Obama said he would refocus US efforts in Afghanistan. His administration plans to send up to 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan over the next year to bolster the approximately 33,000 US troops already in the country.
The US military is making plans to move materiel and fuel to US forces in Afghanistan through a network of commercial links through Russia and Central Asia, a military spokesman said on Friday.
"We are looking for many or multiple routes through the various central Asian countries beyond Kyrgyzstan," said Navy Captain Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for the US Transportation Command. "That would include Uzbekistan, obviously Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and things of that nature. The routes already exist.
The facilities already exist. What we're talking about is tapping into existing networks and using a variety of military and contractor commercial enterprises to facilitate the movement of material supply, non-lethal supplies and everything else that is needed in Afghanistan through these existing commercial routes," he said.