NATO says troops capture district Afghan Taliban chief in Helmand province

NATO says district Afghan Taliban chief arrested

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai has signed a decree launching an Afghan program to lure Taliban foot soldiers off the battlefield, as troops continue rounding up mid- to senior-level militant commanders including a Taliban leader captured in a four-hour gunbattle in the south, NATO said Thursday.

NATO said the Taliban district chief of Now Zad was captured and an unspecified number of insurgents were killed during an Afghan-international force operation Wednesday night in the remote Baghran district in northern Helmand province.

Taliban fighters inside the compound fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns before troops called in a precision airstrike, NATO said.

There were no casualties among civilians, Afghan troops or international service members, but an undisclosed number of Taliban were killed or wounded, the alliance said. Helmand provincial spokesman Dawood Ahmadi said 31 militants were killed.

The joint force seized dozens of automatic weapons, grenade launchers and 20 pounds of opium in the compound at Now Zad, a former insurgent stronghold where U.S. Marines have reported progress in winning over the population after a major offensive last summer.

NATO has reported that 130 mid- to senior-level Taliban have been killed or captured across the nation in the past four months.

As Afghan and international troops work to weaken the insurgency, Karzai signed a decree this week giving life to the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, which has been in the works for months. The program would attract low- to midlevel fighters with promises of security, jobs, literacy and vocational training plus development aid for their villages.

NATO officials and Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, a top Karzai adviser who is crafting the program, have said that insurgents in seven of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces — Herat, Helmand, Uruzgan, Paktia, Baghlan, Balkh and Day Kundi — have expressed interest in signing up for the reintegration program. To join, insurgents must renounce violence, respect the Afghan constitution and sever ties with al-Qaida or other terrorist networks.

“The future of the reintegration process is promising,” Maj. Gen. Philip Jones, director of a reintegration unit at NATO headquarters in Kabul, told reporters Thursday. “There continue to be small pockets of reintegration occurring around the country and a few larger groups are starting to express interest in it as well. People realize that this program is a benefit to entire communities.”

Efforts to persuade insurgents to give up the fight come at the same time that violence is on the rise. June was the deadliest month of the war for the NATO-led force with at least 102 fatalities among international service members. On Thursday, an American service member died following an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan, NATO said.

In northern Afghanistan, two rockets slammed into a base housing about 120 South Korean construction and security personnel in Parwan province, South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Kim Young-sun said. About 120 construction and security personnel were at the base in Parwan province when the rockets struck Wednesday night.

The rocket attacks occurred a day before the South Korean reconstruction team planned to officially launch its rebuilding mission. South Korea withdrew troops from Afghanistan in 2007 following a hostage standoff in which the Taliban killed two South Koreans after demanding that Seoul immediately withdraw its forces.

Elsewhere, a woman and two men were killed Thursday by a roadside mine in Khas Kunar in Kunar district, police Chief Khalilulah Zyaeey said. According to the Ministry of Interior, an Afghan policeman died Thursday when his vehicle hit a roadside mine in Charkh district of Logar province. On Wednesday, two workers for a road construction company were killed and four others were wounded by a roadside bomb in Sabari district of Khost province, the ministry said.

The attacks occurred as Gen. David Petraeus, widely credited with turning around the war in Iraq, prepared to assume command of the U.S. and NATO force in Afghanistan. His predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was fired last week over critical remarks made by him and his staff about Obama administration officials in Rolling Stone magazine.

Petraeus was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday and flew immediately to Brussels, Belgium, where he briefed NATO officials Thursday.