\n Afghan president Ashraf Ghani condemned Sunday the reported massacre of dozens of civilians in a remote area of the war-torn country where the Taliban claimed a victory against military forces.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Criminal terrorists have once again killed civilians, women and children in Sayad district of Sar-e Pul province, adding to their crimes.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"This barbaric act of them is deemed a direct violation of human rights and a war crime,\" Ghani said in a statement.\n<\/p>\n
\n The comments came after the governor of Sar-e Pul said that \"as many as 30 to 40 innocent people... were brutally shot and killed\" in the province's predominately Shiite village of Mirzawalang after insurgents captured it on Saturday.\n<\/p>\n
\n Mohammad Zaher Wahdat, the provincial governor, added that several mosques were set ablaze while an unknown number of villagers had also been taken hostage following a 48-hour battle between insurgents and Afghan security forces.\n<\/p>\n
\n He said 12 insurgents and seven Afghan troops had been killed in the fighting.\n<\/p>\n
\n The village is situated in an extremely remote part of the country, where both the Taliban and Islamic State group fighters have a presence, and AFP was unable to confirm the reports with independent sources.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Taliban said in a statement that it had captured Mirzawalang village but rejected reports of civilians casualties, calling it \"hollow propaganda by the enemy\".\n<\/p>\n
\n The incident comes after the Afghan government claimed last month that Taliban fighters had killed 35 people in an attack on a hospital in central Ghor province.\n<\/p>\n
\n Officials later backtracked though, underscoring the difficulty of verifying information from poor, mountainous areas of Afghanistan made inaccessible by fighting and with patchy communications.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Taliban is at the peak of its summer fighting season and has carried out a number of deadly attacks in recent days, including the killing of two US soldiers in a suicide bomb attack in Kandahar on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Afghan president Ashraf Ghani condemned Sunday the reported massacre of dozens of civilians in a remote area of the war-torn country where the Taliban claimed a victory against military forces. \"Criminal terrorists have once again killed civilians, women and children in Sayad district of Sar-e Pul province, adding to their crimes. \"This barbaric act of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-34248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n