KABUL — Taliban insurgents have reportedly captured or killed large numbers of Afghan government forces in the remote and usually quiet northeastern corner of the country for the second time this year, officials said Thursday.
According to Dawlat Mohammad, the governor of Warduj district, insurgents ambushed a police convoy in the district on Wednesday, killing 10 policemen and taking 16 others prisoner.
A text message sent to journalists from a Taliban official claimed that the insurgents had killed 25 policemen and taken 12 prisoner.
But on Thursday the spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Sediq Seddiqi, disputed both the insurgents’ claims and those of the Warduj governor, saying no police officers had been captured.
The disputed reports were symptomatic both of an increasing casualty rate among Afghan forces and growing government sensitivity about such information. Last year, Afghan officials reported that Afghan National Army soldiers were being killed at the rate of more than three a day, while deaths of police officers were about six a day.
By comparison, coalition casualties have never reached two a day.
Warduj is also where the Taliban killed one Afghan soldier and captured 22 others in an ambush in March. After negotiations with tribal elders in the area, six of the soldiers were released unhurt, but 16 others were executed.