KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Taliban fighters overran multiple checkpoints in a nighttime raid in Afghanistan's volatile southern Helmand province, killing at least 20 police officers as the battle raged into Saturday, authorities said.
The assault came as Afghanistan's military acknowledged the Taliban controls at least four districts across the country.
The attacks in Helmand hit police checkpoints in the Musa Qala district, said Mohammad Ismail Hotak, the head of the province's joint coordination of police and military operations.
He said the attacks wounded at least 10 officers, although the Taliban also seemed to have suffered high casualties.
The spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Sediq Sediqqi, said fighting ended Saturday afternoon with around 30 insurgents killed, including a group leader he named as Abdul Hadi.
"We are investigating how this happened," Omar Zwak, the spokesman for the governor of Helmand province, said. "Why didn't the district center headquarters send reinforcements? It's a big loss. We are saddened."
Saqi Jan, the head of police logistics in Musa Qala, said area checkpoints were manned by officers from the neighboring district of Baghran who had been forced out by earlier Taliban attacks.
"Baghran has been under Taliban control since last year, so these police came to Musa Qala and built themselves a small compound and some checkpoints," he said.
Afghanistan's poorly trained and ill-equipped national police force has borne the brunt of the fighting, and the casualties, in Helmand. Of the 5,588 Afghan government security forces killed last year, 3,720 of them were police officers -- twice the number of regular soldiers killed.
On May 25, 20 police officers were killed in Taliban attacks in Helmand. In April, the provincial police chief in southern Oruzgan Province was killed, just six weeks after his predecessor met a similar fate.
"We do not have modern weapons to fight the Taliban and have no aircraft to target them," said a police officer from Musa Qala, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make statements to the media.
"When we learned that Taliban ambushed the police base, we cannot assist them, due to fears of ambush or IEDs."
Musa Qala district itself nearly fell to the Taliban last year, but the insurgents were turned back, in part by air support from the American-led coalition.
Afghan army Gen. Afzel Aman, the head of the Defense Ministry's operational department, said at a news conference on Saturday in Kabul that the Taliban now control four of Afghanistan's more than 300 districts, including two in Helmand. The other Helmand district they control is Dishu, in the far south of the province, the general said.
The other two Taliban-controlled districts are the Khak-e Afghan district in Zabul province and the Nawa district in Ghazni province, Aman said.
"No other area except those four districts is under the enemy control now," he said.
Earlier this month, the insurgents overran the Yamgan district in northern Badakhshan province, but Aman said that it was now back in government control.
"Fighting is going on almost everywhere compared to last year, and many places are under threat of enemy attack," Aman said.
Lt. Gen. Mohammad Dawran, the commander of the Afghan air force, acknowledged Saturday that a lack of air support since the U.S.-led combat mission ended last year was a problem for the country's security forces. A much smaller number of American and allied troops remain in Afghanistan, mainly for training, advising and counterterrorism operations. U.S. warplanes no longer routinely carry out air support for Afghan units.
"We really have serious problems in this area," Dawran said.
"The president sees and follows this in the national security council himself and works on how we can find a better solution for this problem," he said, referring to President Ashraf Ghani.
Information for this article was contributed by Mirwais Khan and Rahim Faiez of The Associated Press and by Rod Norland and Taimoor Shah of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/14/2015