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| Map of Farah Province (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
by Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
from guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 July 2012 17.50 BST
An Afghan police commander has gone missing and apparently tried to join the Taliban, after attempting to trick and then coerce his unit of 20 men into switching sides with him, a regional police chief said.
News of the attempted defection trickled out in a day of confusing and often contradictory reports that underlined the challenges of understanding the security shifts in the country.
The missing police commander, Mirwais, was responsible for guarding a stretch of road in a restive corner of the remote western Farah province, near the Iranian border.
The attempt to switch sides with an entire unit turned on its head a government and Nato-backed reintegration programme for lower-level insurgents, offering incentives for fighters to lay down arms. Nato says several thousand have signed up.
The first reports from the provincial governor's office said Mirwais had poisoned half his men – presumably those reluctant to sign up to life as an insurgent – and disappeared with weapons, vehicles and his remaining officers.
The governor, Mohammad Akram Akhpalwak, told the Guardian: "There were 20 people under this commander. He poisoned 11 and took nine with him."
He said none of those left behind were seriously harmed by the poisoning. "We are still investigating where they have gone. He is a senior commander, who has worked in this area on the checkpoints for a long time. Nothing like this has ever happened in Farah before."
A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, claimed the commander had joined the insurgency with an impressive collection of men and equipment. "One commander, his name is Mirwais, joined the Taliban with 40 fighters, weapons and one military tank and two vehicles," he said.
But beyond inflating the number of policemen, he offered no details that had not already appeared in reports about the missing group. The insurgents have a track record of exaggerating reports of activities in Afghanistan or claiming responsibility for events planned or carried out by others.
The ministry of the interior, which controls the police, said eight policemen were missing, but denied they had joined the Taliban or that any were poisoned. "We don't know if they have been taken hostage, or gone. The police are doing their best to find them," said a spokesman, Sediq Seddiqi.
In a later update, he said six of the policemen had been found alive, but could offer few other details about where they had gone, why they had disappeared or the fate of the other two, saying only that an investigation was under way.
In the early evening the Farah provincial police chief, Agha Noor, said two men were still missing. He named them as Mirwais and his nephew Janan, and said they were trying to join a local insurgent leader, Mullah Sultan, with the whole unit.
"Nineteen soldiers were with him and he planned to join the Taliban," Noor said. Mirwais had led his men to a remote and violent part of Bala Baluk district on the pretext of carrying out a patrol, he said, and when the commander revealed his plans the men were unhappy. "When the soldiers understood they had to join the Taliban, they didn't want to but he pushed them … They said: 'Mirwais first cheated us and then tried to force us.'"
When provincial police headquarters realised 20 men were missing, they launched an operation to find them and picked up nine on Monday and eight others on Tuesday, Noor said. There was no information on whether Mirwais and Janan had managed to make contact with insurgents, he added.
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