KABUL: Islamist gunmen and renegade police stormed two posts in Afghanistan on Monday, killing 16 policemen in attacks that underscored the vulnerability of fledgling local security forces.
Recruiting and training Afghan forces is central to a US strategy to end the eight-year war against Taliban-led insurgents and start withdrawing American soldiers, but Afghan police struggle with insufficient resources and personnel.
In near simultaneous ambushes in the early hours of Monday, gunmen stormed two police posts in the northwest and south, the main heartland of the Taliban insurgency, killing 16 policemen, the interior ministry said.
Related article: Obama's tough decisionRelated article: Air strike havoc in Germany "Eight police were martyred in a terrorist attack in the province of Baghlan... eight police were martyred in another terrorist attack in the province of Helmand," it said in a statement.
But a local official blamed the attack in the southern province of Helmand on three renegade policemen, who turned their guns on colleagues -- the latest in a string of similar attacks.
"Three of them were involved in the plot. They fired at their police colleagues killing seven. One of the three grabbed weapons and a police vehicle and managed to escape to the Taliban," provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi said.
"Two others were hiding in nearby areas and were detained during a search operation in the morning," he added.
The possibility of Afghan police involvement raised fresh questions about loyalty in the force, which observers say is poorly paid, badly equipped and suffers from high levels of corruption and drug addiction.
Last month, a policeman on a shooting spree killed four of his colleagues before being shot dead by soldiers in southwestern Afghanistan.
In early November, a "rogue" Afghan policeman shot dead five British soldiers at a checkpoint in the Nad Ali district of Helmand -- where the vast majority of Britain's nearly 9,000 troops are based -- before fleeing.
The other attack Monday saw Islamist militants ambush a police post on a highway bisecting northeast Afghanistan from Kabul through Baghlan province, which is a main NATO supply route for troops fighting the Taliban insurgency.
Baghlan governor Mohammad Akbar Barakzai blamed the attack on Hezb-e-Islami, an Islamist militant group strong in parts of the northeast, where violence has steadily increased over the past two years.
A man claiming to speak for Hezb-e-Islami told AFP in a telephone call that his group had carried out the attack.
He said one of the group's fighters also died.
Hezb-e-Islami is led by former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is on the US most-wanted list of terror suspects.
Barakzai said the post had been set up recently to protect NATO supply convoys, which are increasingly coming into landlocked Afghanistan from the north owing to frequent attacks on the principal route through Pakistan.
The NATO-led force in Afghanistan on Monday announced the arrests of two insurgent "facilitators" wanted for supplying weapons to militants in eastern province of Khost and Kandahar in the south.
Afghanistan's insurgency, led by the Taliban but joined by other nebulous groups, is at its most virulent since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the militia from power despite the deployment of 113,000 US and NATO troops.
US President Barack Obama this month ordered an extra 30,000 American troops into the war in a bid to reverse the Taliban momentum, deny Al-Qaeda a safe heaven and train Afghan forces.
President Hamid Karzai has vowed to assume full responsibility for security in the next five years, but says Afghanistan needs aid to help fund its security forces for up to 20 more years.
A senior NATO commander has put the number of police at 68,000, covering a vast, rural country with an estimated population of between 26 and 30 million.
The United States hopes to increase the number of Afghan soldiers and police to 287,000 by July 2011 -- its target date to start withdrawing US soldiers -- but commanders have warned of the challenges involved in recruiting forces. AGENCIES
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