KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Taliban gunmen have surrounded a police compound in the volatile southern province of Helmand after killing 19 policemen and seven soldiers in an ongoing siege, a senior police officer said Monday from inside the compound.
Napas Khan, the police chief in the Naw Zad district, said by telephone that the insurgents had advanced to within 65 feet of the compound after seizing police vehicles and weapons and blocking all roads out of Naw Zad.
"We need an immediate response from the government," Khan said.
He said the attack started at before dawn Monday when the insurgents overran multiple police checkpoints across the district.
"They destroyed or captured most of our checkpoints and now they have reached our police headquarters," Khan said. "They are mostly firing at us from the hills overlooking our compound."
As Khan spoke, gunfire and shouting could be heard in the background.
Helmand long has been a heartland for the Taliban, who profit heavily from opium produced in its fertile river valley.
Government forces initiated an operation against the insurgents in March, in the hope of reducing the impact of the Taliban's annual warm weather offensive. Since that offensive began, however, in late April, attacks across the country have intensified, spreading government forces thin.
As well as the time-worn guerrilla-style tactics of fight-and-run, the insurgents have also stepped up suicide attacks and, in some areas, targeted assassinations and kidnappings.
Also Monday, a suicide truck bomb attack and a separate roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan killed 11 people and wounded dozens more, as the Taliban clashed with supporters of the Islamic State in the west, officials said.
Gov. Asif Nang said the Taliban have been clashing with rival insurgents claiming allegiance to the Islamic State for three days in the western Farah province, leaving at least 10 Taliban fighters and 15 Islamic State supporters dead. He provided no further details.
The clashes provide the latest indication of a small but growing Islamic State presence in the country. Afghan and foreign officials differ over the extent to which the extremist group, which rules large parts of Syria and Iraq, is able to operate in Afghanistan -- where the Taliban have been waging war against the Western-backed government for more than a decade.
The truck bomb struck the gate of the provincial council's compound in the capital of Zabul province, killing at least five people and wounding 62, council director Atta Jan Haqbayan said.
Three of the wounded were council members, Haqbayan said. Mirwais Noorzai, Zabul's police chief, said the attacker used a small truck.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack. No group immediately claimed responsibility.
In related news, a peace envoy from Afghanistan met in western China last week with former Taliban officials with close ties to Pakistan's intelligence agency, in an attempt to keep open the possibility of formal Afghan peace talks, officials said Monday.
The meeting, hosted by China and, in part, organized by Pakistani officials, took place Wednesday and Thursday in Urumqi, capital of the western region of Xinjiang, which has mountainous borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan and is home to many Muslims.
The main representative of the Afghan government was Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, who was, at the time, a key member of the country's Peace Council, the group charged with exploring talks with the insurgency, and since then has been nominated by the Afghan president as defense minister. On the other side of the table were three figures from the old Taliban government in Afghanistan, according to current and former officials with knowledge of the discussions who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.
Stanekzai is awaiting confirmation as defense minister by the Afghan Parliament and has been the architect of efforts by the government to begin formal peace negotiations.
The Taliban members came to Urumqi to reiterate familiar positions, and the representatives of the Afghan government said it was ready to make a strong effort to build trust if the Taliban agreed to peace negotiations, a senior Afghan official said.
But Ghani's spokesman, Ajmal Obaid Abidy, said Monday that "the Afghan government has not conducted any negotiations yet."
The Taliban, for their part, issued a statement Sunday saying that they never took part in a meeting with the Afghan government. But the three main Taliban attendees were not official representatives of the Afghan Taliban.
The three were Mullah Jalil, a former foreign minister; Mullah Abdul Razaq, a former interior minister; and Mullah Hassan Rahmani, a former governor of Kandahar province.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Monday that she had no specific information on the meeting in Urumqi, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Information for this article was contributed by Mirwais Khan of The Associated Press and by Edward Wong and Mujib Mashal of The New York Times.
A Section on 05/26/2015