Kabul sends troops and police to troubled north

Following fighting in the northern province of Faryab late last week, officials at the Afghan ministry of interior told IRIN on Monday the situation was calm and that people had gone back to work. According to the ministry, the Afghan National Army (ANA) is controlling the provincial capital, Maimana, and Kabul has sent additional police to boost law and order in the troubled province. “The situation in Maimana is calm and normal, ANA soldiers have taken control of all routes and the interior ministry has sent an additional 200 police from the capital on Sunday who will reach Maimana late Monday,” Lutfullah Mashal, an interior ministry spokesman, told IRIN. Hundreds of national troops were sent to northern Afghanistan after forces loyal to renegade Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum overran the city of Maimana on Thursday. General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s largely ethnic Uzbek militia invaded Faryab from neighbouring provinces on Wednesday. According to latest reports, at least one person was killed and 10 others wounded in the Faryab incident. The skirmishes in Faryab were followed by another armed encounter in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif between forces loyal to Dostum and a local Tajik warlord, Atta Mohammad, on Saturday. The clashes took place in Kod-i-Barq, a town about 20 km from the main northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in Balkh province. “A small factional skirmish took place in the Mazar fertilizer factory residential area which resulted in a few injuries,” Mashal said, adding that Mohammad Shafi, a local commander, was involved in the fighting. “The situation is calm and a governmental team is assigned to investigate the incident.” Reports from Mazar said schools and other public institutions were closed on Sunday following Saturday’s incident in Kod-i-Barq. According to the United Nations in Kabul, 500 members of the ANA had been deployed to restore order to Maimana. “These units along with representatives of the Security Commission of the North and the National Security Directorate (NSD) are also removing unauthorised checkpoints and weapons from the city,” Manoel de Almieda e Silva a spokesman of the United Nations Assistant Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said on Sunday. It was the second time in less than a month that the government has sent in troops from the fledging national army to keep order in troubled provinces and deal with unrest involving local militia and warlords. In March, some 1,500 ANA troops were rushed to the western city of Herat after forces loyal to a commander appointed by central government killed the country's aviation minister and son of the provincial governor, Ismail Khan. According to UNAMA, these two incidents highlight the importance of the UN-backed plan to disarm factional militias like Dostum’s. The government plans to demobilise 40,000 fighters before elections scheduled for late summer. The violence, latest of its kind, developed just 10 days after the conclusion of a landmark donors' conference in Berlin where international community pledged US $8.2 billion to Afghanistan over the next three years. President Karzai, whose government is a configuration of former anti-Soviet guerrilla leaders and pro-democracy figures who came from the West, had bluntly promised at the conference to disarm warlords and eradicate the booming opium trade as a matter of priority.