Taliban fighters closed in on another district in Afghanistan on Sunday as officials sought to reassure an increasingly angry public that security would improve.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, the insurgents were besieging the governor\u2019s compound in Ajrestan district in Ghazni, south of the capital Kabul, although officials said reinforcements had arrived and were relieving police defending the town. The fighting in Ghazni, which has long had a heavy Taliban presence, follows several days of fighting in Farah province, on the other side of Afghanistan on the border with Iran where the insurgents came close to overrunning the provincial capital.<\/p>\n
General John Nicholson, the top US commander in Afghanistan visited Farah on Saturday with the ministers of the interior and defence and the head of the NDS intelligence service. \u201cFarah did not fall and Farah will never fall,\u201d he said, calling on the Taliban to accept President Ashraf Ghani\u2019s offer of peace talks. \u201cWe will stay with you until we bring this war to a peaceful conclusion,\u201d he said. He met local officials in the governor\u2019s compound and heard a bitter litany of complaints about the failure of the government to protect the city and the province, where the Taliban control many areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to make Farah better, then please, you should help before there\u2019s an incident,\u201d said Belqis Roshan, a former senator. \u201cWe have 10 districts, and apart from the centres, they\u2019re under Taliban rule,\u201d she said. Reinforcements rushed in from other provinces and repeated strikes by Afghan and US air forces pushed the insurgents back from the city centre but bazaars remain deserted and the streets empty. \u201cPeople are still worried about the situation,\u201d said Farah resident Abdullah. \u201cThe Taliban have a strong presence in almost all districts and are still hiding in some parts of the city.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the Taliban have continued the spring offensive they launched last month, heavy fighting has been seen from Badakhshan and Baghlan provinces in the north to Farah in the west and Ghazni and Zabul in the centre. In Ajrestan district in Ghazni, Mohammad Arif Noori, a spokesman for the provincial governor said fresh commando forces had arrived and the Taliban pushed back from the town centre. \u201cFighting is continuing but the attacks on the district center have been repelled,\u201d he said. However local officials said the centre remained under severe threat and the local governor had fled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taliban fighters closed in on another district in Afghanistan on Sunday as officials sought to reassure an increasingly angry public that security would improve. On Sunday, the insurgents were besieging the governor\u2019s compound in Ajrestan district in Ghazni, south of the capital Kabul, although officials said reinforcements had arrived and were relieving police defending the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31723,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31721\/revisions\/31723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}