Source: France24<\/p>\n
“The hospital is overwhelmed and we call on people to donate blood,” said Shir Mohammad Karimi, deputy health director in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.<\/p>\n
A separate attack in a neighbouring province on Tuesday left 15 security forces dead and 12 wounded, as militants step up their offensives following a ratcheting up in US airstrikes in\u00a0a war-weary country<\/a>marking 16 years of conflict this month.<\/p>\n The victims of the ongoing Gardez attack, which was claimed by the\u00a0Taliban<\/a>\u00a0in a tweet, include women, students and police, officials told AFP.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “At first a\u00a0suicide bomber<\/a>\u00a0detonated a car filled with explosives near the training centre, making way for a number of attackers to start their assault,” the interior ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n A battle between the attackers, armed with guns and suicide vests, and security forces is under way inside the centre which is located near the Paktia police headquarters, it said.<\/p>\n Fighting has been going on for more than four hours.<\/p>\n A local official said two car bombs went off near the compound that also houses the provincial headquarters of the national police, border police and Afghan National Army.<\/p>\n “A group of gunmen have entered the compound and fighting is ongoing,” Allah Mir Bahram, a member of the Paktia provincial council, told AFP.<\/p>\n Photos posted on Twitter purportedly show two large plumes of smoke rising above the city, suggesting two bombs were detonated in the assault.<\/p>\n Paktia borders Pakistan’s militancy-plagued tribal areas where the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network has a presence.<\/p>\n The attack came hours after a US drone strike in\u00a0Pakistan<\/a>‘s Kurram tribal district, part of which borders Paktia, killed at least 26 Haqqani militants, officials have said.<\/p>\n Local officials told AFP that drones were still flying above Kurram after the attack, the deadliest targeting militants in the Pakistani tribal region this year.<\/p>\n In Kurram last week the Pakistani military rescued a US-Canadian family who had been abducted by militants in Afghanistan in 2012. US President Donald Trump has said they were being held by the Haqqani network.<\/p>\n Ghazni attack<\/strong><\/p>\n The extremist group has been blamed for carrying out spectacular attacks across Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001 and is known for its frequent use of suicide bombers.<\/p>\n It was blamed for the truck bomb deep in the heart of the Afghan capital\u00a0Kabul<\/a>\u00a0in May that killed around 150 people.<\/p>\n The Haqqanis have also been accused of assassinating top Afghan officials and holding kidnapped Westerners for ransom.<\/p>\n These include the recently rescued hostages Canadian Joshua Boyle, his American wife Caitlan Coleman, and their three children — all born in captivity — as well as US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was released in 2014.<\/p>\n Militants also targeted security forces in Ghazni on Tuesday, some 100 kilometres (62 miles) from Gardez, officials there said.<\/p>\n That attack, which has ended, followed the same pattern, with “terrorists” detonating an explosives-laden Humvee vehicle near a police headquarters and attackers storming the building, Haref Noori, the Ghazni governor’s spokesman, told AFP.<\/p>\n Fifteen security forces were killed and 12 wounded, Ghazni police chief Mohammad Zaman told AFP, adding “dozens of Taliban” also died.<\/p>\n The latest attacks come as four-way talks between Afghanistan, Pakistan, the United States and China were held Monday in Oman with the aim of ending the Taliban’s 16-year insurgency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: France24 The death toll in an ongoing suicide and gun attack on a police training centre in a southeast Afghan city has risen to 32 with more than 200 wounded, a hospital official said Tuesday. “The hospital is overwhelmed and we call on people to donate blood,” said Shir Mohammad Karimi, deputy health director in Gardez, the capital of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/66"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1044,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions\/1044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}