WUNRN
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32620595 - Website Link Includes Video.
AFGHANISTAN-KUNDUZ – TALIBAN & ISLAMIC STATE FIGHT
TOGETHER AGAINST AFGHAN FORCES – MASSIVE DISPLACEMENT – WOMEN & CHILDREN
This
AFP photo taken in
late April 2015 shows displaced Afghan women with
their children from the Imam Sahib district, Kunduz Province.
By David Loyn, BBC News, Kunduz
7 May 2015 - The Afghan government has launched a major
offensive against Taliban forces near the north-eastern provincial capital of
Kunduz.
The Taliban have come close to the city of Kunduz in recent
fighting, leaving it cut off and displacing tens of thousands.
A BBC correspondent who has flown into Kunduz has heard gunfire
and artillery exchanges not far from its centre.
Afghan officials say foreign jihadists trained by the Islamic
State (IS) group are fighting alongside the Taliban.
Provincial governor Mohammed Omer Safi told the BBC that the
bodies of 18 foreign fighters, including three Chechen women, had been found.
Security forces and Taliban have been involved in a stand-off
for about a week after the insurgents launched an offensive on Kunduz at the
end of April.
The insurgents are currently said to be massed in the Gul Tepa
district on the southern outskirts of the city.
This is the first positive confirmation by a senior government
official that Islamic State is operating alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Until now, particularly in the south of the country, IS fighters
have often clashed with the Taliban. But the governor said that the battle for
the north is different, and here IS fighters are "supporting the Taliban,
training the Taliban, trying to build the capacity of the Taliban for a bigger
fight".
And, he said, they were more violent because they wanted to die
in battle as martyrs.
As well as from Afghanistan's immediate northern neighbours, Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, the dead came from Chechnya and Turkey. They were
wearing black headbands marked with the same Islamic verses used by IS in Syria
and Iraq.
Correspondents say the
advance is the most serious threat to a provincial capital in years.
Afghan
army and police are involved in the fighting but there is no substantial help
from foreign troops.
The
BBC's David Loyn in Kunduz says Afghan forces are thinly spread in this region,
and as well as this determined assault on Kunduz the Taliban and their allies
have also attacked remote outposts in the mountains of Badakhshan further east.
Reports
said at least 13 police were killed in the attacks.
Governor
Safi said the Afghan forces in Kunduz did not have enough air power and their
helicopters lacked the armaments they should have.
Only
a few thousand Nato troops remain in the country, largely in training roles,
after their combat mission ended in December. They have turned down several
requests to assist with air strikes.
People displaced by
the fighting are spread across the city and rural areas of the province of
Kunduz.
The
prolonged fighting could lead to a bigger problem if there is a failure to
bring in the harvest this month, our correspondent says.
Kunduz
supplies half of Afghanistan's rice crop, so delays could have a far-reaching
impact, he adds.
International
aid agencies are trying to assist the displaced, with the World Food Programme
preparing emergency kits of flour, pulses, cooking oil and high-energy biscuits
for 500 families, spokesman Wahiddullah Amini told Reuters news agency.