Abdul Rashid Dostum

:: Taliban fighters launched a three-pronged attack on parts of the central-eastern Afghan city of Ghazni overnight, driving a Humvee packed with explosives into the entrance of a district governor’s compound during the assault, police said on Saturday.

The assault on Ghazni, on the highway linking the capital Kabul with the southern city of Kandahar, ramps up the Taliban’s spring offensive.

In the north of the country, the Taliban has stepped up its operations and targeted Kunduz, a city that they have twice managed to seize for brief periods in the past.

The Taliban have had a strong presence in the province of Ghazni for years, but provincial police chief Aminullah Amerkhil said the overnight attack from three directions was the fiercest launched by the insurgents. However, he said his men had held out.

Hashim Zwak, the police chief of Waghaz district, was wounded in the hand during the fighting. He described how the militants drove a Humvee packed with explosives into the entrance of the district governor’s compound and blew it up before other fighters tried to overrun the police defenders.

“They put all their effort into it but they could not defeat us,” Zwak told Reuters from a hospital in Ghazni city.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, however, that the fighters had gained control of Waghaz district, straddling the highway to the south of the city and fighting was continuing in other areas.

Separately, sources said Afghanistan’s embattled Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum has left for Turkey, in what could be another long exile for the former warlord following allegations that he raped and tortured a political rival.

Dostum, a powerful ethnic Uzbek warlord linked to a catalogue of war crimes, departed late Friday in the middle of a criminal investigation that has drawn attention to the culture of impunity that is hobbling Western-backed efforts to instil the rule of law in Afghanistan.