Pakistani Taliban attack kills 38 Afghans

At least 33 police and five civilians were killed in fighting after Taliban crossed over from Pakistan and attacked a remote region in eastern Afghanistan, an official said Wednesday. Nuristan provincial governor Jamaluddin Badr said about 40 rebels also died in the two days of clashes that follow weeks of tit-for-tat allegations of cross-border attacks that have fanned diplomatic tensions between the neighbours. Dozens of rebels who began crossing the border from Pakistan on Tuesday triggered the fight, Badr told AFP, attacking police posts in the Kamdesh district of Nuristan. "The report we have now from the area is that 33 border police and five civilians, two of them women, have been killed," he said. He said most of the dead rebels were Pakistan Taliban. "The bodies of some of them remain in the area and a clean-up operation is under way right now," he said. The interior ministry had reported late Tuesday that clashes were taking place between insurgents and police in the border area, saying then that 27 rebels had been killed, 12 of them Pakistanis. The escalating conflict in the rugged border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan has forced more than 200 Afghan families to flee so far, according to local officials, and is escalating tensions between the uneasy neighbours. For weeks, security forces on both sides of the unmarked border have issued claim and counter-claim over cross-border rocket and guerrilla attacks that have reportedly killed dozens of villagers and terrified hundreds of others. The rise in violence in an area swamped with Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked fighters underscores the problems faced in attempts to forge contacts between militants and regional power brokers and peacefully resolve a decade of war. US troops earlier this year abandoned their easternmost outposts in the furthest reaches of Kunar and Nuristan provinces and since then insurgents have flooded back into Afghan valleys by the border, analysts say. Afghan officials say about 800 rockets, mortars and artillery shells have been fired from Pakistan into Afghan villages since late May, leaving dozens of civilians dead, injured or displaced. The Pakistan army denies it has targeted Afghan territory, saying that a few stray rounds may have crossed the border and complaining that villages on its side of the border have themselves been the victim of Afghan-based Taliban violence. On Wednesday, Pakistani officials accused several hundred militants of infiltrating the border and attacking a village in the Pakistani district of Upper Dir, killing an anti-Taliban elder and setting fire to three boys schools. "The village militia and Pakistan troops are retaliating," district police chief Mir Qasim Khan told AFP. In Afghanistan, the top border police commander for the eastern region, General Aminullah Amerkhail, has resigned in protest at Kabul's reluctance to respond with counter-attacks, and ministers have reacted with fury. President Hamid Karzai has appealed for calm over the issues, but has expressed "deep concerns" with Pakistan's top commander General Ashfaq Kayani and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari in a recent meeting.