KABUL, Afghanistan–On the day that NATO began handing off control of security to Afghan authorities, an aide to President Hamid Karzai was killed by suicide attackers and NATO troops and Afghan forces killed as many as 13 Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan.
The Karzai adviser, Jan Moham
med Khan, former governor of Uruzgan province, was killed with three bodyguards and a member of parliament from Uruzgan, Hashim Watanwal, in an attack on Khan’s home in western Kabul, said Gen. Mohammed Zahir, head of the Kabul police criminal investigation unit. Other reports said two of the Taliban insurgents were killed and a third continued battling police.
Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was assassinated last week at his home in Kandahar.
Earlier Sunday, in eastern Afghanistan province of Ningrahar, NATO troops and Afghan security forces killed as many as 13 Taliban fighters in an hours-long battle that ended with an airstrike by a NATO helicopter, Afghan and coalition officials said.
A statement by the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force said NATO and Afghan forces had targeted a Taliban leader in the area who was using a school building as a staging area.
An unknown number of Taliban fighters equipped with bomb vests, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and AK-47s had occupied the school building, said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a provincial spokesman.
The school was empty because of the summer break and there were no civilian casualties, Abdulzai said.
The NATO and Afghan troops came under heavy fire from the Taliban fighters, the ISAF statement said. After several attempts to clear the building were resisted, an airstrike was called in. The helicopter gunship destroyed the building.
Also on Sunday, NATO forces handed over the security of mostly peaceful Bamiyan, one of the seven provinces chosen for the first phase of the security transition, to the Afghan national police.
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