Afghan National army soldiers search a car at a checkpoint ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 20, at the Independent Election Commission compound in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Oct.... (Associated Press) 
 
 Afghan National army soldiers search a car at a checkpoint ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for Oct. 20, at the Independent Election Commission compound in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul) (Associated Press) 
 
 KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The three top officials in Afghanistan's Kandahar province were killed when their own guards opened fire on them at a security conference Thursday, the deputy provincial governor said, and a Taliban spokesman said the target was Washington's top general in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, who escaped without injury, according to NATO. 
 
 Agha Lala Dastageri, Kandahar's deputy provincial governor, said powerful provincial police chief Abdul Raziq was among the dead, along with Kandahar Gov. Zalmay Wesa, who died of his wounds at a nearby hospital. 
 
 Dastageri said provincial intelligence chief Abdul Mohmin also died inside the governor's sprawling residence where the attack occurred. 
 
 Three Americans — a service member and two civilian workers — were wounded in the shooting, said U.S. Col. Knut Peters, a spokesman for NATO troops in Afghanistan. Their conditions were not immediately known. 
 
 "Gen. Miller is unhurt," said Peters. Miller is the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. 
 
 It was members of Wesa's elite guard unit who turned their guns on their colleagues during a high-level security meeting ahead of Saturday's parliamentary elections. 
 
 Khalid Pashtun, a member of parliament from the province, said Afghan Security Forces cordoned off the area and a U.S. military helicopter circled overhead as a gun battle that began at 3 p.m. local time raged on for more than one hour. 
 
 Peters said initial reports indicate one of the original attackers is dead. He had no further information. 
 
 In a telephone interview, the spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern region, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said the Taliban carried out the attack. He said Gen. Miller was the target and said Raziq, the governor and the intelligence chief were killed. 
 
 Pashtun said an Afghan military corps commander was also among the dead, although he didn't name him. 
 
 An Interior Ministry official speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media said Raziq rarely visited the governor's residence and was meticulous about his own security. 
 
 Razik was a particularly powerful figure in southern Kandahar and a close U.S. ally despite widespread allegations of corruption. He ruled in Kandahar, the former Taliban heartland, with an iron fist and had survived several attempts to kill him, including one last year that resulted in the death of five diplomats from the United Arab Emirates. 
 
 Security has been steadily deteriorating in Afghanistan with increasingly brazen attacks being carried out by insurgents and Afghanistan's security forces have been on high alert ahead of Saturday's elections. 
 
 The Taliban have threatened the polls and warned teachers and students not to participate in the vote and not to allow schools to be used as polling centers. The insurgents said in a statement Wednesday that they will target Saturday's elections, which they view as illegitimate, but that they do not want to harm civilians. 
 
 Meanwhile, a NATO convoy was attacked late Wednesday near the Afghan capital, killing two civilians and injuring five Czech troops, Afghan officials and the Czech military said Thursday. 
 
 The attack, which took place in the district of Bagram in Parwan province, also wounded three Afghan civilians, said Wahida Shakar, spokeswoman for the provincial governor. 
 
 Bagram is about 40 kilometers (24 miles) from Kabul and is also the home of a sprawling U.S. military base 
 
 The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. 
 
 Of the five Czech soldiers, one was seriously injured when their vehicle overturned following the explosion. The soldier underwent surgery and the Czech military said he was not in life-threatening condition. 
 
 Earlier, NATO spokeswoman Sgt. 1st Class Debra Richardson had said three alliance service members were hurt in the bombing but didn't provide more details. 
 
 Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said an insurgent suicide bomber rammed his car into the NATO convoy. 
 
 The attack on the NATO convoy came at the end of a particularly violent day across Afghanistan as tensions are rising ahead of the country's parliamentary elections on Saturday. 
 
 A Taliban bombing in southern Helmand province killed a candidate running in the elections. The Taliban also attacked checkpoints in the northern Baghlan province, killing six policemen and wounding two others in a four-hour battle. Also, in eastern Maidan Wardak province, a suicide car bomber targeted a military vehicle, killing two Afghan army troops. 
 
 In recent months, Afghan troops have come under near-daily attacks. NATO troops, which handed over security to Afghan forces at the end of 2014, mostly train and assist with air power. So far this year, eight U.S. soldiers and three other NATO service members have died in Afghanistan. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Karel Janicek in Prague contributed to this report. ||||| Abdul Raziq and his men have received millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. training and equipment to help in the fight against the Taliban. But is our ally—long alleged to be involved in corruption and drug smuggling—also guilty of mass murder? 
 
 Above: Afghan General Abdul Raziq, seen here with American forces during a joint 2009 patrol near the Pakistan border (Emilio Morenatti/AP) 
 
 Shyly, at times smiling with weak adolescent bravado, the two young men recounted to me how they were beaten and tortured. It was July, and we were sitting at a table in the cavernous restaurant where they both work, in the stupefying summer heat. They slouched forward with their arms on their knees, frequently glancing down toward their open sandals, at toes where livid burns from the electrical wires were still visible. 
 
 I will call them Najib and Ahmad, though their names, like others in this article, have been changed to protect their safety. Both 23 years old, they looked like gangly young men who should be playing basketball on the street outside their house, or perhaps video games inside. But here in Kandahar City, the linchpin of the U.S. military’s campaign against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, they had found themselves the victims of America’s Afghan allies. 
 
 One afternoon in June, two younger boys who worked at the restaurant, ages 12 and 14, had been stopped by the Afghan National Police while carrying home leftovers from an afternoon wedding. The boys, who were each paid about $60 a month, explained that they always took home leftover meals for their families. But this time they were arrested and accused of bringing food to insurgent fighters hiding outside the city. 
 
 Around 11 o’clock that night, police showed up at the restaurant and arrested Najib and Ahmad as well, accusing them of having sent the younger boys out to feed the Taliban. They were taken to police headquarters, where they were handed over to men wearing the mottled gray-green uniforms of the Border Police. 
 
 “They said, ‘We are going to beat you,’” Ahmad recalled. 
 
 The Border Police were a new sight in the city: rough-looking types with wraparound shades and bandoliers of grenades, who could be seen lounging at checkpoints throughout the city and guarding installations such as the governor’s palace. Though restricted by Afghan law to operate only in international airports or within 50 kilometers of the border, they’d entered the city on May 29 when their boss, Brigadier General Abdul Raziq, was appointed acting chief of police in Kandahar province, following the assassination of his predecessor. Raziq was well known as a warlord and suspected drug trafficker who had waged a brutal campaign against the Taliban. He was also a close ally of both President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. military. 
 
 Inside the station, the policemen tied a scarf to Najib’s handcuffs and hung him from the ceiling until he felt as if his arms were being pulled from their sockets. Then two men—one in uniform and holding a black metal baton, the other in plain clothes and wielding a length of cable—began beating him across his hips and thighs. A third man, also in plain clothes, questioned Najib: “What was the name of the commander you were bringing food to? How often do you bring food to the enemy?” Sobbing, Najib pleaded his innocence. In a nearby room, Ahmad could hear his friend’s screams, though he was spared for the time being. 
 
 When the beating was over, Najib and Ahmad were taken outside and thrown into the back of an armored Humvee, where they lay all night with their wrists still tightly cuffed, suffocating in the stiflingly hot, enclosed interior. 
 
 Early the next morning, they were taken to the governor’s palace, a long, low white compound fronted by a series of arches, jointly guarded by American soldiers and Border Police, where U.S. and Afghan officials meet on a daily basis. The police brought them around the back, to a filthy room that smelled of human waste, where they were shackled to the wall next to two other prisoners. Then, one at a time, they were taken to a second room, empty except for a gas-powered generator. 
 
 Najib went first. He was forced to lie on his back, and wires leading to the generator were attached to toes on both his feet. A group of Border Police crowded around him, jeering and spitting snuff on his face. “Tell us the truth,” they commanded. Then they switched on the power. “It felt,” Najib told me, “like my whole body was filled with moving knives.” 
 
 After he passed out from the pain, it was Ahmad’s turn to be tortured. When the two awoke from the ordeal, they were placed in separate rooms. In the evening, they were taken to police headquarters to see Abdul Raziq himself. 
 
 Raziq is just 33 years old, slender and boyish-looking, with a square jaw and a widow’s peak that tufts up beneath the embroidered pillbox cap he favors when he’s not in uniform. Uneducated but clever and charismatic, he is, despite his youth, one of the most powerful warlords in southern Afghanistan. He controls a militia of several thousand men, as well as the lucrative drug-smuggling routes that pass through his territory, which includes a key trading town called Spin Boldak, near the border with Pakistan. 
 
 That June evening, Najib and Ahmad were seated facing Raziq, who asked them to explain why they had been arrested. They told him about the younger boys who would take leftover food home to their families, and whether it was because they had not confessed, or because their stories had checked out, Raziq ordered them released. 
 
 Najib and Ahmad complained to me of suffering nerve damage in their wrists from being cuffed for two days, and both said they’d had problems with their kidneys since the electrocutions: Ahmad, who had the more-severe burns, urinated blood for three days afterward. I examined the wounds on Ahmad’s and Najib’s toes—distinct circular burn marks that were still raw and unhealed—and I spoke with a number of their co-workers, who corroborated their claims. I was also given photos of their injuries taken immediately after they were released, and was told their story independently by a source inside the Kandahar police department unhappy with the abuses taking place under Raziq. “That’s what happened to them, when they were innocent,” this official said. “Think of what they do to the guilty.” 
 
 What happened to Ahmad and Najib is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger pattern of abuse that has occurred wherever Raziq has been in power, first in his outpost of Spin Boldak and now in Kandahar City. Raziq has long been publicly suspected of drug trafficking and corruption; allegations that he and his men have been involved in extrajudicial killings, torture, and illegal imprisonment have been trickling out for years. Raziq categorically denies all such charges, telling The Atlantic, “When someone works well, then he finds a lot of enemies who try to ruin his name.” 
 
 Last fall, Raziq and his militia were given a starring role in the U.S.-led military offensive into Taliban-controlled areas west of Kandahar City, a campaign that boosted his prestige immensely. Mentored by an American Special Forces team, Raziq’s fighters won public praise from U.S. officers for their combat prowess. After the offensive, Raziq was promoted to brigadier general—a rank requiring a direct order from President Karzai—in a January ceremony at the governor’s mansion. As Ben Moeling, who was until July the State Department’s senior official in Kandahar province, explained to me at the time, the promotion was “an explicit recognition of his importance.” 
 
 Nor was that promotion the only evidence of Raziq’s continuing ascent. In May, when Karzai appointed him chief of police for Kandahar province, Raziq accepted only on the condition that he also remain in charge of Spin Boldak, the seat of his economic and tribal power. So, in a move that enabled him to retain both jobs, Raziq was appointed “acting” police chief in Kandahar. 
 
 While beatings in police custody have been common in Kandahar for as long as there have been police, a number of Afghan and international officials familiar with the situation there told me that Raziq has brought with him a new level of brutality. Since his arrival, Raziq has launched a wave of arrests across the city in coordination with the government intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security. One human-rights official who has conducted prison visits in Kandahar told me that the number of prisoners is up more than 50 percent since Raziq’s arrival. In July, even the U.S. military seemed to have realized that the situation was out of hand, when American and NATO forces quietly halted the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities in southern Afghanistan, because of credible allegations that prisoners had been severely abused while in police and NDS custody. 
 
 Though Raziq has risen in large part through his own skills and ambition, he is also, to a considerable degree, a creation of the American military intervention in Afghanistan. (Prior to 2001, he had worked in a shop in Pakistan.) As part of a countrywide initiative, his men have been trained by two controversial private military firms, DynCorp and Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, at a U.S.-funded center in Spin Boldak, where they are also provided with weapons, vehicles, and communications equipment. Their salaries are subsequently paid through the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a UN-administered international fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor. Raziq himself has enjoyed visits in Spin Boldak from such senior U.S. officials as Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. 
 
 In public, American officials had until recently been careful to downplay Raziq’s alleged abuses. When I met with the State Department’s Moeling at his Kandahar City office in January, he told me, “I think there is certainly a mythology about Abdul Raziq, where there’s a degree of assumption on some of those things. But I have never seen evidence of private prisons or of extrajudicial killings directly attributable to him.” 
 
 Yet, as a 2006 State Department report shows, U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians, the details of which have, until now, been successfully buried. And this, in turn, raises questions regarding whether U.S. officials may have knowingly violated a 1997 law that forbids assistance to foreign military units involved in human-rights violations. 
 
 Among a certain group of Kandaharis, the rough outlines of the massacre in question are well known. But nailing down a consistent, detailed version of what took place required two years of cross-checking with a diverse set of sources, including tribal elders, human-rights workers, police officers, and government officials. Most important, I was eventually given direct access to information and photos from a suppressed police investigation into the episode. 
 
 On March 20, 2006, Shin Noorzai, a burly smuggler in his mid-30s, arrived with 15 companions at the guesthouse of an acquaintance, Zulmay Tufon, in Kabul. It was the eve of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, occasion for Afghanistan’s biggest festivities, and the capital city’s bedraggled trees were strung with fallen kites and the first buds of spring. 
 
 Shin had grown up in southern Afghanistan during the violent, turbulent times of the anti-Soviet and civil wars, and had once been jailed in Pakistan for kidnapping a man. His companions, though, were a mixed group. Some were smugglers, but others were simply friends from the vicinity of the Afghan-Pakistani border, farmers or traders accompanying him on a trip to Mazar-e Sharif, a northern city famous for its new-year celebrations. 
 
 According to an acquaintance of Shin’s who was also present at the gathering, he and his friends had arrived at the invitation of another man, Mohammed Naeem Lalai, an old friend of Shin’s who was then working as an officer in the Border Police. It was Lalai who had persuaded Shin and his friends to stop in Kabul on their way to Mazar. As the group sat down to dinner, Shin’s acquaintance, a fellow tribesman, watched uneasily, nervous about the company Shin was keeping. He offered to make the trip with Shin instead. “Come with me to Mazar,” he said to him. 
 
 Shin replied that he was going to travel up to Mazar with Lalai. But first, he said, Lalai was taking him to another house where music and entertainment were promised. That night, as darkness fell over Kabul, Shin and his 15 companions left the house with Lalai. Their friends and families would never see them alive again. 
 
 At the second house, Shin and his friends were apparently drugged. Unconscious, they were bound and gagged, then loaded into vehicles with official plates, one of them a green Ford Ranger with the seal of the Border Police on its doors. 
 
 Driving along back roads, the cars made their way 500 kilometers south to Kandahar province, and by the next morning arrived at Spin Boldak, where Abdul Raziq, then a Border Police colonel in his mid-20s, was waiting for them. 
 
 Raziq and Lalai had together lured Shin and his associates to Kabul. The tribes to which Raziq and Shin belonged had been feuding over smuggling routes, and Raziq held Shin responsible for the 2004 killing of his brother. Shin had been a marked man ever since. His 15 companions were just going to be collateral damage. 
 
 Raziq and his men loaded their captives into a convoy of Land Cruisers and headed out to a parched, desolate stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border. About 10 kilometers outside of town, they came to a halt. Shin and the others were hauled out of the trucks and into a dry river gully. There, at close range, Raziq’s forces let loose with automatic weapons, their bullets tearing through the helpless men, smashing their faces apart and soaking their robes with blood. After finishing the job, they unbound the corpses and left them there. 
 
 Arriving back in Spin Boldak, Raziq reported to his superiors and to the press that he had intercepted “at least 15” Taliban fighters infiltrating from Pakistan, led by the “mid-level Taliban commander Mullah Shin,” and had killed them in a gun battle. “We got a tip-off about them coming across the border. We went down there and fought them,” Raziq told the Associated Press the next day. It was the beginning of a cover-up that would go all the way up to President Karzai in Kabul. ||||| An Afghan policeman stands near a vehicle which carried the deputy governor of Kandahar province, Abdul Latif Ashna, in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011. A suicide bomber... (Associated Press) 
 
 An Afghan policeman stands near a vehicle which carried the deputy governor of Kandahar province, Abdul Latif Ashna, in Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011. A suicide bomber... (Associated Press) 
 
 A suicide bomber riding a motorcycle packed with explosives rammed into a car carrying the deputy governor of Afghanistan's southern Kandahar province on Saturday, killing him and wounding three of his bodyguards, the Interior Ministry said. 
 
 The attacker struck as the official, Abdul Latif Ashna, was being driven to work in the provincial capital, said a ministry spokesman, Zemeri Bashary. 
 
 The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. In a text message to reporters, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef said the suicide bomber killed the deputy governor as well as three of his body guards and his driver. 
 
 U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, who was traveling in Kandahar, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the assassination. 
 
 Kandahar, located in the Taliban's traditional southern stronghold, has been the scene of several attacks recently. Two weeks ago a bicycle bomb targeting police vehicles near the city center wounded at least 10 people _ six civilians and four police. Last month, a suicide car bombing in the city center killed three people and wounded 26 others, most of them police. 
 
 "The enemies of Afghanistan cannot stop the Afghan people from development and progress by killing such personalities," Karzai said in a statement. "There are thousands of other brave Afghans who will stand against the enemy and serve the people." 
 
 Also on Saturday, Karzai expressed his sadness over the deaths of six members of a prominent Afghan family who were killed when a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up Friday at Kabul supermarket frequented by affluent Afghans and foreigners. 
 
 In a statement, Karzai said Dr. Massoud Yama, a young doctor at a military hospital, his wife, Hamida Barmaki, a political science professor at Kabul University, and their four children died in the attack. She was an activist and served on the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. 
 
 Yama's mother and Barmaki's mother-in-law is former Afghan senator Maboba Hoqiqmal, who currently is Karzai's legal affairs adviser. 
 
 Afghan police officials said initially that two or three foreigners were among eight people killed in the bombing. However, the Kabul Police Department released a statement Saturday evening saying that no foreigners died in the incident. So far, no foreign embassy has confirmed the death of any foreign victims. 
 
 Mohammad Zahir, the chief of criminal investigation for the Kabul police, said one man, one boy and six females _ all Afghan _ died in the blast. Fifteen other people were injured in the explosion _ 10 Afghans and five foreigners, he said. 
 
 The Taliban said their target was an official with the U.S.-based Xe security contractor, formerly known as Blackwater. A representative for USTC Holdings, which recently bought the North Carolina-based Xe, said no one associated with the company was killed or wounded in the bombing. 
 
 A senior international intelligence official in Kabul said Saturday that the Taliban's Haqqani network, which has ties to al-Qaida, carried out the attack, but that there was no intelligence to suggest that the security contractor was being targeted. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the information. 
 
 Elsewhere in the capital, more than 200 demonstrators rallied at the Iranian Embassy to protest the execution of Afghans in Iran and call on Tehran to release Afghan political prisoners. Similar protests, all organized by the National Solidarity Party, attracted hundreds of other demonstrators in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan and Herat in the west. 
 
 Protesters in Kabul carried signs that said "Death to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," showed photographs of Afghans held in Iran and depicted blood dripping from the red stripe of the Iranian flag. 
 
 Afghan lawmakers have claimed that as many as 45 Afghans had been executed in Iran, but the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that number is exaggerated. The ministry, which has raised the issue with Iranian officials in Tehran, has confirmed the execution of six Afghans in Iran but has not provided details about why they were killed. 
 
 "The ones fighting for freedom have been jailed in Iran," said Mohammad Yama, who helped organize the protest in Kabul. "We are here to show our unity. We wanted to burn down our effigy of Ahmadinejad, but the Afghan police took it away." 
 
 In a ceremony at the Afghan Ministry of Defense, the deputy chief of staff for operations of the U.S.-led coalition, John W. Nicholson, was promoted to the rank of major general and will now be the force's point man for transferring the responsibility for security from international forces to Afghan ones by the end of 2014. 
 
 The Afghan Army's Chief of Operations, Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, pinned the second star on Nicholson during the ceremony attended by Gen. David Petraeus, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. Nicholson, who has served as a brigade commander in the east and deputy commander for the south, directed the Joint Staff's Pakistan-Afghanistan coordination cell before returning to the country last month. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writers Heidi Vogt in Kandahar and Deb Riechmann and Patrick Quinn in Kabul contributed to this report.
– The top US commander in Afghanistan survived an assassination attempt Thursday, but a high-ranking Afghan official was killed. US Army Gen. Scott Miller was not injured in the attack in Kandahar City, which took place after a meeting to discuss security ahead of Saturday's national elections, reports the Wall Street Journal. However, the assault in which bodyguards for a regional governor opened fire did kill Kandahar's police chief, Gen. Abdul Raziq, described by the Journal as "one of southern Afghanistan's most powerful political and military figures." One other Afghan official was killed, the regional governor critically wounded, and three Americans—a service member and two civilians—were also hurt, per the AP. The New York Times calls the attack "one of the most devastating Taliban assassination strikes of the long Afghan war," and the Taliban confirmed afterward that Miller and Raziq had been the targets. The assault took place at the regional governor's compound. "When the high-ranking participants were heading to helicopters, an enemy infiltrator opened fire on them,” says an Afghan government official. The 39-year-old Raziq was a controversial figure, seen as crucial in maintaining order in the region but also accused of human rights abuses and corruption.