In Taliban Attacks, a Reminder That Winter Offers Afghans No Mercy<br />Not far away, on Highway 1, which links Helmand to Kandahar, the second-largest city in Afghanistan, a police convoy on Tuesday struck a hidden roadside bomb<br />that killed one policeman and wounded three others, according to Omar Zwak, the spokesman for the Helmand governor.<br />On Tuesday, 11 police officers were killed in a Taliban attack in the south, but<br />that was only one in a long and not unusual series of assaults against Afghan security forces.<br />He did not give recent casualty figures, but Afghan officials have said<br />that last year 6,287 members of the military and police died and 12,354 were wounded, with more than 500 members of the security forces taken prisoner.<br />Five hundred miles farther north along the ring road, an Afghan National Army convoy was ambushed on Monday, between Ghormach in Badghis Province<br />and Maimana in Faryab, with heavy fighting reportedly continuing on Tuesday.<br />The killings of the police officers on Tuesday took place in the southern province of<br />Helmand, which has for the last year been the most violent place in Afghanistan.<br />On several previous occasions, officials reported the death of the Taliban’s shadow governor for the province, Mullah Abdul Salam, and they made<br />that claim again on Monday, saying he was killed with eight other militants during an American airstrike in Dashte Archi district.
