Militants Storm Afghan Government Building

KABUL – Insurgents wearing police uniforms and armed with suicide vests stormed a police compound in eastern Afghanistan early Sunday morning, killing three policemen in a gunfight that lasted four hours before Afghan and NATO security forces regained control of complex, government officials said.

The dawn attack occurred a mile east of the provincial capital of Khost, a volatile province bordering the tribal areas of Pakistan that have served as a haven for militants crossing into Afghanistan. It follows a pattern of attacks this spring in which insurgents wearing Afghan military or police uniforms have attacked fortified government compounds. On Saturday, a suicide bomber believed to be wearing an army uniform blew himself up in a tent on the grounds of the national military hospital in the Afghan capital of Kabul, killing at least six people who were training to be medics and wounding more than 20 others.

In Sunday’s attack, four men in Afghan border police uniforms got out of a corolla station wagon and rushed toward the traffic police department and killed the gate security guard, according to a police officer who witnessed the assault just as we was coming on duty.

“They were in ABP uniforms,” the officer, who asked not to be named, said. “I thought, what do they want this early in the morning at the traffic police department. Then they shot the guard.”

The militants ran inside and then began firing down from the top floors onto a small police base below that housed a detachment of quick reaction forces, said Mohammed Yaqoob Noorzia, the deputy provincial police chief. The men were wearing vests laden with explosives and were armed with rocket propelled grenades and AK-47s, he said.

Afghan and NATO security forces surrounded the compound and firefight ensued. A spokesman with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force could not say if NATO troops engaged in the firefight. “We’re still getting information on it, everything is sketchy right now,” the spokesman said.

The shooting finally stopped four hours later, leaving three police officers dead and wounding four others, including a civilian who was passing by, Mr. Noorzia said. The fate of the gunmen was not immediately known.

“We don’t know how many of the suicide bombers blew themselves up and how many were killed in the firefight with police,” Mr. Noorzia said.

The attacks have raised concerns about Taliban infiltration in the Afghan national security forces, but also underscore the ease with which militants, posing as soldiers or police officers, can blend into the ranks and bypass security checkpoints.

Meanwhile, two women were killed and five other people were wounded in Zabul province in southeastern Afghanistan Sunday when their vehicle hit a roadside mine, officials said.

An employee of The New York Times in Khost contributed reporting.

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Voices From the Storm | Bob and Anna Simpson, La Center, Ky.: Uprooted by Rising Waters, but Not Ready to Walk Away

 

Hunched by age but ginger on his cane, Mr. Simpson, 94, bought the land some 40 years ago, thinking he would retire here from his lifelong home across the river in Cairo, Ill., the collapsed city that now sits threatened by the overfed Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

“I’m still thinking about it,” said Mr. Simpson, who with his wife, Anna, 92, heeded a mandatory evacuation order and is now staying with their daughter and her family at the farm. “Right now, we’re just sponging off them.”

Leaving Cairo might seem like an easy choice to some. Mr. Simpson has witnessed his town, once home to more than 15,000, go from “the hustlin’-est, bustlin’-est town you’d ever seen” to its current state — with less than 3,000 residents, one physician, no dentist and a surfeit of torched and abandoned buildings. Homeless dogs roam the streets, sinkholes yawn from the asphalt and the river remains dangerously high.

Mr. Simpson even concedes that he and his wife, who has long wanted to leave, would like to be closer to their daughter here, who could more easily drive them to medical appointments and handle household chores.

Still, he cannot commit to leaving — at least not yet.

The couple remains independent. Mr. Simpson continues to serve as the chief of Cairo’s auxiliary fire department, a position he has held for the past 54 years. He was known to occasionally ride trucks to fire scenes until injuring his back in a fall last year. He is the town’s institutional memory, and over the decades he has consulted with mayors on everything from flood prevention and economic development to city schools and civil defense.

“If it was left up to me, I’d have still been there,” Mr. Simpson said while tucking into a lunch of ham and pineapple rings at a local diner. “They said at our age, they would feel better if they knew we were out of Cairo.”

Perhaps most important, Mr. Simpson — like his hometown — has so far withstood the worst the river has had to offer. He did not decamp when, at 10, he saw a paddleboat pushing its way up a flooded road during the Great Flood of 1927. When the waters rose again 10 years later, Mr. Simpson avoided an evacuation order by ingratiating himself to the town’s mayor, walking the levees and fetching lunch for local officials.

“I figured: ‘I’m a pretty good swimmer. I’ll find a high spot somewhere,’?” Mr. Simpson said. “Leaving Cairo didn’t even enter my mind.”

But where these earlier disasters failed, the Great Flood of 2011 has succeeded, and the Simpsons, now sipping coffee in the safety of the diner, fled with nothing more than a few days’ clothes.

 

County Was Struggling Even Before the Storm

  Glenda Dillshaw sorted through debris in Pleasant Grove, Ala., in Jefferson County.? The county is also dealing with a huge debt. More Photos ?

There are few places in America with more precarious finances than Jefferson County, Ala., the scene of some of the worst devastation from this week’s deadly tornadoes.

Even before the dark funnel clouds touched down, the heavily indebted county, which includes the city of Birmingham, was teetering on the edge of what could be the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It is drowning under $3.2 billion in debt, the legacy of a giant sewer project and corrupt, risky bond deals that sent a former top official to prison. And it recently lost one of its main sources of revenue when the State Supreme Court struck down its tax on workers. County officials are worried that they could run out of money in late July or early August.

Now the strained county must struggle to perform a central role of government: protecting the lives and safety of its residents. So as county search and rescue workers sought the living and the dead, triage centers treated the injured and work crews struggled to clear the debris, the Jefferson County Commission met Thursday to make sure that some of the money-saving measures it had instituted would not impede the response to the disaster.

“The needs of the citizens will come first,” said Commissioner James A. Stephens, who oversees the county’s finances and whose district saw some of the worst destruction. “If we have to burn through this cash we’re attempting to preserve, in order to get us through this disaster, the County Commission most certainly will do so.”

People in Jefferson County have spoken about the sky falling, in a figurative sense, long before the clouds lowered this week and swirling winds leveled whole neighborhoods. For many residents, the tornadoes seemed like the latest in a long litany of woes.

“This is not a county that needed this,” said Lexis Bennett, 36, a paramedic who lives in Pleasant Grove, a Birmingham suburb among the hardest-hit places.

His house was destroyed. His dogs were killed. He barely survived by huddling in a closet with three other people and then crawling out of the rubble.

Asked about Jefferson County’s troubles, he shook his head and laughed. “Money?” he asked. “They ain’t got none. And now this tornado.”

County officials expect the federal government to cover much of the cost of the disaster, said Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the county’s Emergency Management Agency. He said the county’s response had not been constrained by its fiscal woes.

But a natural disaster was the last thing the county wanted to face as it sought to untangle itself from a series of man-made ones.

The county’s trouble began more than a decade ago. Its sewers were discharging raw sewage into local rivers during heavy rains, and a federal court ordered the county to refurbish the system. The county began borrowing money to pay for the upgrade. Then things went badly awry.

Local officials signed off on risky, and ultimately very expensive, exotic bond deals that they barely understood — some after they had been bribed.

Larry P. Langford, the former president of the county commission, was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison after he was found guilty of accepting more than $230,000 in cash, expensive clothing and jewelry in exchange for steering millions of dollars in bond business to a prominent investment banker. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit in 2009 charging that J. P. Morgan Securities had made unlawful payments to friends of the county commissioners to help it win bond business; J. P. Morgan settled the suit, agreeing to drop its claims for $647 million in fees it had been seeking, and to pay a $25 million penalty to the commission and $50 million to the county.

Those exotic deals backfired when the economy collapsed, and they sharply drove up the county’s costs instead of reducing them. The county defaulted on its bond payments; a court-appointed receiver is preparing a plan to help pay down the debt.

The Alabama Supreme Court dealt the county another blow in March, when it upheld a ruling striking down the county’s occupational tax — basically an income tax on people who work in the county — on the grounds that it was not properly advertised before the Legislature approved it in 2009. The tax netted the county $74 million a year, but the new Legislature — which, after November’s elections, is now in Republican hands — has been reluctant to approve a new tax.

The new sewer system suffered minor damage in the tornado, said John Young, the receiver who oversees it. But he said it should be quickly repaired.