[One police officer,
stationed at a base near the one that came under attack, said the insurgents
surrounded it and by dawn had completely destroyed it. Roads around the base,
known as the Takhtapol base, were planted with mines and booby traps,
preventing its defenders from escaping and other officers from coming to their
aid, the officer stationed at the nearby base said.]
By Rod Nordland
KABUL, Afghanistan —
Afghanistan’s police force took another severe blow from the Taliban on
Saturday, as 17 police officers were killed in a clash with the insurgents in
the southern province of Helmand, officials said.
The insurgents overran a
police base near the center of the strategically important district of Musa
Qala, the officials said. Local police officers and witnesses described a
large-scale attack that began after midnight and continued until daylight.
“There are also
casualties to the Taliban,
but we do not know the figures,” said Omar Zwak, the spokesman for the governor
of Helmand Province. “We are investigating how this happened. Why didn’t the
district center headquarters send reinforcements? It’s a big loss. We are
saddened.”
Of the 19 police officers
stationed at the base, 17 were killed and two were wounded, he said.
One police officer,
stationed at a base near the one that came under attack, said the insurgents
surrounded it and by dawn had completely destroyed it. Roads around the base,
known as the Takhtapol base, were planted with mines and booby traps,
preventing its defenders from escaping and other officers from coming to their
aid, the officer stationed at the nearby base said.
Musa Qala, in Helmand’s
north, adjoins the district of Baghran, which the Taliban already control,
according to Maj. Gen. Mohammad Afzal Aman, chief of operations for the
Ministry of Defense. Officers assigned to fight the Taliban in Baghran were
stationed at the Takhtapol base, which is less than a mile from the district
headquarters in Musa Qala.
Afghanistan’s poorly
trained and ill-equipped national police force has borne the brunt of the
fighting, and the casualties, in Helmand, as in many other parts of the
country. Of the 5,588 Afghan government security forces killed last year, 3,720
of them were police
officers — twice the number of regular soldiers killed.
On May 25, 20 police officers were
killed in Taliban attacks in Helmand. In April, the provincial
police chief in southern Oruzgan Province was killed, just six weeks
after his predecessor met a similar fate.
“We do not have modern
weapons to fight the Taliban and have no aircraft to target them,” said a
police officer from Musa Qala, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make statements to the
news media. “When we learned that Taliban ambushed the police base, we cannot
assist them, due to fears of ambush or I.E.D.’s,” the officer said, referring
to improvised explosive devices.
Musa Qala district itself nearly fell to
the Taliban last year, but the insurgents were turned back, in part by air
support from the American-led coalition.
General Aman said at a
news conference on Saturday in Kabul that the Taliban now controlled four of
Afghanistan’s more than 300 districts, including two in Helmand. The other
Helmand district they control is Dishu, in the far south of the province, the
general said.
The other two
Taliban-controlled districts are the Khak-e Afghan District in Zabul Province
and the Nawa District in Ghazni Province, General Aman said. “No other area
except those four districts is under the enemy control now,” he said. Last week
the insurgents overran the Yamgan District in
northern Badakhshan Province, but General Aman said that it was now back in
government control.
Lt. Gen. Mohammad Dawran,
the commander of the Afghan Air Force, acknowledged Saturday that a lack of air
support since the American-led combat mission ended last year was a problem for
the country’s security forces. A much smaller number of American and allied
troops remain in Afghanistan, mainly for training, advising and
counterterrorism operations. American warplanes no longer routinely carry out
close air support for Afghan units.
“We really have serious
problems in this area,” General Dawran said. “The president sees and follows
this in the national security council himself and works on how we can find a
better solution for this problem,” he said, referring to President Ashraf
Ghani.
Taimoor Shah contributed
reporting from Kandahar.
*
[The disease, known as MERS, is known to have infected 138 people in South Korea since the first patient was identified on May 20. The outbreak is the largest to date outside the Middle East, where the virus first emerged in 2012 in Saudi Arabia and has killed more than 400 people.]
SEOUL, South Korea — The South Korean
government’s failure to share information quickly with the public and establish
an efficient disease-control system contributed to worsening the outbreak of
Middle East respiratory syndrome in the country, a joint panel of experts from
theWorld
Health Organization and South
Korea said Saturday.
The
experts have spent the past week visiting hospitals and meeting with health
authorities to assess the outbreak,
which has killed 14 people, and make recommendations.
“One of the things South
Korea failed to do was
a transparent and rapid distribution of information, which is the most
important thing to do,” said Lee Jong-koo, the leader of the South Korean side
of the joint mission, at a news conference Saturday.
A “failure to establish
proper governance” in controlling the outbreak in its early stages also
contributed to “confusion” among the public, Mr. Lee said.
The
disease, known as MERS, is known to have infected 138 people in South Korea
since the first patient was identified on May 20. The outbreak is the largest
to date outside the Middle East, where the virus first emerged in 2012 in Saudi
Arabia and has killed more than 400 people.
One of the tasks of the
joint mission was to determine why so many people were infected in South Korea
in a relatively short period of time. On Saturday, Keiji Fukuda, chief World
Health Organization official
on the panel, pointed to several factors: South Korean doctors’ unfamiliarity
with MERS; the country’s “overcrowded” emergency rooms; the practice of “doctor
shopping” for care at many different clinics; and the fact that hospital rooms
here tend to be bustling with visitors. Nearly all of the country’s confirmed
MERS patients were infected while seeking care or while visiting patients at
hospitals. Hospital staff members were also infected.
Mr. Fukuda said the panel
had found no evidence to indicate that MERS was spreading in the broader
population. “However, continued monitoring for this possibility is critical
throughout the entire outbreak,” he said. “Now, because the outbreak has been
large and is complex, more cases should be anticipated.”
Both Mr. Fukuda and Mr.
Lee said that the rate of new infections was decreasing, as South Korean officials
have improved their communications with the public and carried out stronger
infection-control measures. Twelve new MERS cases were reported Saturday.
The government has come
under heavy criticism for withholding critical information early in the outbreak,
like the names and locations of hospitals where infections had occurred. It
eventually released the hospitals’ names, weeks after the first case was
discovered. The outbreak has been a blow to President Park
Geun-hye, whose approval rating has fallen in recent weeks.
Mr. Fukuda, who said
transparency during an outbreak was “the basis of trust,” urged South Korea to
continue to enforce a strong quarantine and monitoring system. He also
recommended that the country invest more in its public health system,
particularly by hiring more epidemiologists and expanding its laboratories’
capacities.
