Five soldiers killed in Taliban bomb attack on army outpost
Five Afghan soldiers have been killed in a bomb explosion carried out by Taliban militants in a tunnel below an army outpost in southern Afghanistan.
Police spokesman Mohammad Ashraf Watandost said on Wednesday that six soldiers were also injured in the attack on Tuesday in Maiwand district in the southern province of Kandahar.
Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, claimed that militants had destroyed a large arms cache, leaving 35 soldiers killed and injured.
Separately, Afghan border security forces on Wednesday foiled an attack on Italian military advisers at a paramilitary base in Herat Province in the west of the country.
Noorullah Qadri, the commander of 207 Zafar military corps, said two assailants who had infiltrated the border security forces tried to kill the Italians.
"The Italian nationals escaped uninjured. One attacker was gunned down immediately and the other was arrested," he added.
The Italian forces are part of the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission, purportedly engaged in training and advising local Afghan troops battling Taliban militants in four western provinces.
Italy has 895 troops attached to Resolute Support.
The attacks come few days after the Taliban militant group rejected a call by the Afghan government for formal peace talks next month in Saudi Arabia.
A Taliban leader announced on Sunday that the group’s representatives would meet US officials in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah for the fifth round of talks within the next few days but not the representatives of the Afghan government.
This is while the government of President Ashraf Ghani says the talks should be “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned,” insisting on continued efforts to establish a direct line of diplomatic communication with the Taliban.
The Taliban’s five-year rule over at least three quarters of Afghanistan came to an end with a US-led invasion in 2001; but 17 years on, the militant group continues to be active on much of Afghan soil. The Taliban have strengthened their grip over the past three years, with the government in Kabul controlling just 56 percent of the country, down from 72 percent in 2015, a recent US government report showed.
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