Afghan police are reporting a Taliban attack which killed at least 23 civilians and wounded a number of others in Kandahar Province, attributing the killings to a desire for revenge after an attack on police checkpointed failed and got a number of Taliban fighters killed.
The Taliban denied that the attacks were revenge, but did apparently involve killing people who resisted their move into the Nesh District, which borders Taliban-held territory in the neighboring Uruzgan Province.
The report was that the Taliban wanted to use civilian homes as cover for an offensive, but that the civilians had objected to the idea and tried to resist. The slain included several members of the family of one of the police involved in guarding the checkpoints.
The Taliban controls a large amount of territory in Kunduz, Uruzgan, and Helmand Province, and has smaller areas of controls across the nation. They control more territory now than at any time since the 2001 US invasion.