Attacks in Afghanistan’s south kill six

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber rammed a car into a police vehicle Wednesday in southern Afghanistan, killing a district police chief, two other policemen and a civilian in the latest attack targeting those with links to the government or international forces.

The police chief of Daman district in Kandahar province where Afghan and NATO forces are ramping up security was among those killed in the attack on a bridge leading into Kandahar city, according to Dr. Mohammad Rasool at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar.

Five other Afghan policemen and a civilian were wounded.

The bridge, which recently was rebuilt, was the site of two bomb attacks against NATO forces in recent months.

In another targeted attack in the south, Taliban insurgents on Tuesday night broke into the home of Atta Jan Kajrwal, the Zabul province director of border and tribal affairs, killing him and his wife, said Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar, a spokesman for the governor.

Another person was injured in the attack in Shahjoy district.

Violence is on the rise, especially in the south, as Afghan and international forces push into areas controlled by the Taliban.

It’s part of a strategy to rout insurgents from their southern strongholds and provide security for the population to allow Afghan officials to bolster governance.

NATO reported Wednesday that a senior Taliban commander was among several insurgents detained Monday in Naway-e-Barakzayi district of Helmand province.

The commander, who was not identified, directed military operations and handled governance issues in Taliban-controlled areas of the district, the coalition said.

Also in Helmand, a joint coalition-Afghan force raided a compound used by the Taliban as a prison, freeing 27 Afghan civilians who were shackled and held captive, an official said.

Thirteen Taliban fighters were killed in the raidTuesday in the Musa Qala district, provincial spokesman Dawood Ahmadi said Wednesday.

Five captives had been slain before the force arrived, he said.

In the east, hundreds of demonstrators blocked a main highway between Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad on Wednesday to protest two deaths in a night raid.

The protesters said the two men killed were innocent civilians, while NATO said its forces killed two insurgents.

In a separate incident, NATO said a civilian irrigating a field in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province was killed Tuesday during afire fight.

Also in Kandahar, NATO said a joint force killed 10 insurgents Tuesday while pursuing a Taliban commander responsible for arranging weapons deliveries.

Six insurgents who ran from a compound in Panjwai district were killed in an airstrike and four others were killed by ground forces.

In other developments, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday that the Pentagon has expressed willingness to discuss the online whistle-blower’s request for help in reviewing classified documents from the Afghan war and removing information that couldharm civilians.

The Pentagon denied any direct contacts with WikiLeaks.

“This week we received contact through our lawyers that the General Counsel” of the Pentagon “says now that they want to discuss the issue,” Assange said by telephone.

Assange added that the contacts have been brokered by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, which the investigative agency denies.

“Any allegations that we are somehow involved in the redaction or review of material, we flatly deny,” said agency spokesman Chris Grey.

Grey declined to comment on whether Army investigators had been approached at all by WikiLeaks to review the war files, but Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said there had been no “direct” contact on the matter.

Whitman also said the Pentagon is not interested in cooperating with WikiLeaks to purge the names of Afghan informants from the files.

“We are not interested in negotiating some sort of minimized or sanitized version of classified documents,” he said.

“These documents are property of the United States government,” Whitman said. “The unauthorized release of them threatens the lives of coalition forces as well as Afghan nationals.” Information for this article was contributed by Mirwais Khan, Karl Ritter and Pauline Jelinek of The Associated Press.