Kabul, Afghanistan – Fighting erupted across Afghanistan on Wednesday, with 10 suspected rebels, six police and five medical workers killed and rockets slamming into the capital.
President Hamid Karzai warned that the militants were receiving support from drug traffickers and that his nation could fall back into the hands of terrorists if its booming heroin trade, which provides nearly 90 percent of the world’s supply, isn’t stamped out.
In the latest violence, five medical workers were killed Wednesday as they were returning to Kandahar after treating refugees in a nearby camp, said Dr. Abdul Qadir, director of U.N. and U.S.-sponsored Afghan Help Development Services, which employed the five.
Gunmen opened fire on their vehicle as they drove through the desert. Two of the five dead were doctors. Three other medical workers in the vehicle were wounded, Qadir said.
U.S. warplanes also killed 10 suspected Taliban rebels Monday in an attack on their mountain hide-out in Uruzgan province, which has long been a hotbed of militant activity, the local governor, Jan Mohammed Khan, said Wednesday.
A U.S. military spokeswoman, Sgt. Marina Evans, confirmed the attack and said that “several of the enemy had been killed.”
Six police officers were killed by suspected Taliban who ambushed their convoy in the same area a day later, Khan said. One officer was still missing and feared dead. Reinforcements were rushed to the area “to hunt down the Taliban,” he said.
Four rockets exploded in Kabul just hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived Wednesday.
One hit a large compound housing the government’s intelligence service, but there were no casualties. Another detonated outside the Canadian ambassador’s residence, wounding two guards, one seriously, police said. The two others hit the outskirts of the city.
Fighting also erupted in northern Afghanistan between two rival militia factions, wounding 10 people, officials said.
