Five militants die as Afghan security squad targets base

AFGHAN security forces killed five insurgents and wounded one during a pre-dawn raid in Kabul yesterday, with authorities saying they had thwarted a mass attack and captured intelligence pointing to the militant Haqqani network.

Soldiers from Afghanistan’s spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), launched the raid just after midnight, entering a single-story house compound on the fringes of Kabul which the insurgents were using as a base.

“They planned mass attacks in different parts of Kabul disguised in burqas,” the NDS said in a statement

Police added that two insurgents escaped during a gun battle that raged for five hours around the isolated compound, where the insurgents had been amassing weapons in a newly built brick house.

The militants had three vehicles loaded with explosives and suicide-bomb vests, as well as large stores of rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, and planned to occupy a high-rise building to attack the city’s business heart.

The Taleban issued a statement denying that yesterday’s operation had targeted their fighters, although the insurgents often play down their defeats and inflate successes.

The NDS said target maps and telephone numbers recovered from the compound had numbers for the Haqqani network based outside Afghanistan.

Haqqani network militants, allied with the Taleban and largely based in northwest Pakistan’s lawless border lands, have been blamed by Nato-led forces in Afghanistan for several high-profile attacks in recent months.

Dozens of militants launched a co-ordinated assault in central Kabul on 15 April, occupying a high-rise construction site and pounding the city’s diplomatic and government centre with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire in an attack that took 18 hours to quell.

On 22 June Afghan security forces backed by foreign advisers fought a day-long battle with insurgents after a Taleban attack on a lakeside hotel on Kabul’s outskirts. But security forces and Nato-led foreign troops say the sporadic attacks do not point to weaknesses in Afghan forces and intelligence ahead of a withdrawal by most foreign combat troops to be completed by 2014.

The United States is pressing Pakistan to step up its efforts to root out militants, in particular the Haqqanis.

Pakistan has strong traditional links with the Afghan Taleban and other militant groups, but it denies accusations it uses them as proxies to gain leverage in Afghanistan ahead of any settlement to the war, or in case a civil war breaks out after foreign troops leave.

Pakistan has also long complained that the United States has overlooked its contribution to the fight against militants.

Nato’s top commander in Afghanistan, US General John Allen, met Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad yesterday to discuss cross border security in the wake of hundreds of rocket attacks in eastern Afghanistan which Afghan officials have blamed on the Pakistan army. Pakistan has denied the 
accusation.

“We are making significant progress toward building a partnership that is enduring, strategic, carefully defined, and that enhances the security and prosperity of the region,” Gen Allen said in a statement after his talks.