As NATO troops exert pressure on Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, militants have regrouped in western provinces and ignited violence that has killed a dozen people in two days, officials said Thursday. Afghan and NATO fear that Farah province, which borders Iran and is twice the size of Maryland, could become a Taliban sanctuary if military power isn't used to crush the militant threat quickly. Farah is a predominantly Pashtun area where people have ethnic links to the Taliban militia. U.S.-led and NATO forces have been battling Taliban and allied militants this year in Afghanistan's worst spate of violence since the American-led invasion that toppled the hard-line regime in 2001 for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Up to 200 Taliban fighters in dozens of pickup trucks poured into the Farah town of Bakwa early Thursday, surrounding a police compound and firing rocket-propelled grenades at policemen, said Maj. Gen. Sayed Agha Saqeb, the provincial police chief. Taliban fighters took over the compound for an hour before police reinforcements drove them off into the desert darkness. Two militants were killed and two wounded, while two police also died and two were wounded, Saqeb said.
The raid came a day after Taliban insurgents ambushed a police patrol in Farah. Four police and four militants were killed. Several days earlier, a roadside bombing there wounded four Italian soldiers. "If there is the possibility of some sort of security deterioration in the area, we will get onto it very quickly," NATO spokesman Maj. Toby Jackman told The Associated Press.
Just 1,600 NATO-led troops operate in western Afghanistan's desert plains and mountainous provinces like Farah. The region has long been spared the kind of violence witnessed in southern and eastern provinces. Canadian-led troops are mounting a fierce incursion into southern Kandahar province's Panjwayi and Zhari districts. They have killed at least 510 Taliban in an operation that began Sept. 2.