Taliban overrun Afghan police checkpoints in Helmand province

MUSA QALA, Afghanistan, June 14 (UPI) -- Taliban forces killed at least 20 police officers when they raided a series of checkpoints in a remote region of southern Afghanistan, according to reports.

The attacks came Friday and Saturday against police positions in Helmand province's Musa Qala district.

Fighting was ongoing on Saturday and police reinforcements had been sent to assist, the BBC quoted police spokesman Mohammad Ismail Hotak as saying. Some of the checkpoints were manned by as few as two or three officers, he said.

The Taliban claim to have killed up to 25 police officers in the raids. Hotak said 10 officers had been wounded and that Taliban forces suffered heavy casualties.

The weekend assaults come less than two weeks after informal talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government began in Norway, and they join an uptick in attacks by Taliban forces after a majority of NATO forces left Afghanistan last year.

Earlier this month, gunmen killed nine humanitarian workers in Kabul in a Taliban-suspected attack, and in late May the Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Zabul province that killed five people and wounded 70. On May 19 the Taliban claimed credit for an explosion that killed four people near several government buildings in Kabul.

According to U.S. and Afghan officials, about 330 Afghan soldiers and police are killed or wounded each week in Taliban attacks, and the level of casualties among those forces in the first 15 weeks of 2015 is 70 percent higher than it was during the same period last year.

After U.S. President Barack Obama announced plans for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011, coalition forces officially handed the security operation to Afghan forces in December 2014.

The president's original timetable called for a reduction of U.S. troops in the country to 5,500 by the end of 2015, but in late March Obama announced the U.S. force would maintain its current posture of nearly 10,000 troops, used for advising and assisting Afghan forces, until the end of the year.