At least 100,000 people have fled their homes around a northern Afghan city amid fighting between government forces and Taliban insurgents, the United Nations said today.
The fighting around Kunduz comes as authorities said gunmen in the country's east killed at least two people and kidnapped 36 others in an assault on a cricket match Thursday.
The battle in Kunduz began April 24. Thousands of army reinforcements have been deployed to the city, where government forces battle insurgents across front lines that stretch nearly all around Kunduz.
Officials had feared in the days following the attack that the city, the capital of Kunduz province, could fall to the Taliban. Defense officials now say that most areas are back under government control.
A spokesman for the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees in Kabul, Mans Nyberg, said that 15,000 families had registered for assistance since the fighting began. Households registered by the agency had fled their villages around Kunduz into the city, he said, while an unknown number of others fled in the opposite direction.
"We have direct access only to those coming into Kunduz city," he said.
The Taliban launched their spring offensive with the Kunduz attack. The offensive has seen the militants take their anti-government fight to most regions of the country, with eastern areas near the Pakistan border, like Paktia province where the cricket attack took place, the most vulnerable.
Gen Zelmai Oryakhail, Paktia province's police chief, said today the gunmen opened fire on the match, killing a police officer and a civilian, and wounding five others in Zazi Aryub district.
All but three of the abductees had been freed, he said. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though officials suspect the Taliban carried it out.
