Kabul, July 8, (dpa/GNA) – Fighting with Taliban militants has continued for a second day in parts of the capital city of Badghis province, local officials said on Thursday.
The fighting has been raging since the morning in police district three and four of the Qala-e Naw city, provincial councillors Monisa Qaderi and Abdul Aziz Beig said.
Some shops and small businesses have been burnt down during the fighting. The city has been in total shutdown since Wednesday when Taliban militants stormed it, the councillors said.
Hundreds of families have fled the city to the neighbouring Herat province and remote villages of the province, according to the officials.
There has been no electricity since yesterday and the prices of passenger vehicles have soared, the officials said.
According to councillor Abdul Aziz Beig, the surprise Taliban attack came after the defection of some high-ranking security officials to the militants.
The Taliban militants had sustained a high number of casualties in the past two days, largely due to being unfamiliar with the territory, councillors said.
It was the first time the Taliban tried to take control of a whole city since the start of the official withdrawal of the international forces from the country on May 1.
Badghis is a strategically important province that links western Afghanistan with Faryab province in the north of the country, where the Taliban militants have made significant advances in the past couple of weeks. The province also shares a border with Turkmenistan.
Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government have stalled. But a Taliban spokesman, Mohammad Naeem, said on Thursday that in a meeting between high-ranking Taliban officials and some Afghan politicians in Tehran, both sides have acknowledged that war is not a solution in Afghanistan, and political settlements should be sought out.
Naeem added that another meeting would be held with the politicians in the near future to discuss a transition mechanism from war to lasting peace, an Islamic system for the country and how to achieve it.
The developments come at a fragile point for the country. On Tuesday, the US Pentagon said that US forces had completed more than 90 per cent of their withdrawal process.
US-led foreign forces went into Afghanistan in 2001 to root out the Taliban, which had given shelter to members of al-Qaeda, the group behind the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Late last month, the US government had said it wanted to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by the end of August. Other NATO countries contributing to the international forces are following suit.
GNA