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BBC MUNDO RADIO
The Taliban assault began on Saturday Afghan security forces are battling Taliban insurgents for a second successive day inside the southern city of Kandahar.
Two policemen and two civilians have been killed in the fighting, and 46 other people have been injured.
A number of Taliban fighters have also been killed.
The Taliban deny the attacks are a response to the death of Osama Bin Laden, saying they had been planned for some time.
Saturday saw the insurgents launch co-ordinated assaults with suicide bombers and rocket-propelled grenades targeting government buildings.
In one area of the city, gunmen in a four-storey shopping centre exchanged fire with security forces in a compound belonging to Governor Tooryalai Wesa.
On Sunday, heavy machine-gun fire and explosions could still be heard in Kandahar as Afghan forces - reportedly aided by Nato-led foreign troops - sought to mop up remaining pockets of Taliban resistance.
The city's streets were virtually empty of people, an AFP news agency reporter said, with Taliban fighters still occupying a traffic police building, and firing guns and rockets.
"It is a complicated building, that is why it has taken a while to clear up but soon we will clear the building of the enemy," Kandahar border police commander General Abdul Razeq said.
Governor Wesa - who earlier promised that the Taliban fighters would be killed "one by one" - said the insurgents were putting up heavy resistance.
'Spectacular'Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said the militants are attacking civilians to hide their defeat, caused by the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
But Taliban spokesman Yusuf Ahmadi said the Kandahar attacks had been planned for some time as part of the insurgents' annual "spring offensive", announced last week, and had nothing to do with Bin Laden's death.
A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), Major General James Laster, described it as a "spring offensive spectacular attack which was thwarted".
There are about 130,000 international troops in Afghanistan, the majority of them from the US.
Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and a hotbed of the insurgency, has been the focus of military operations by government and international forces over the past year.
A senior Kandahar police official has blamed the attacks on last month's escape by about 500 prisoners, many of them Taliban, from the main jail in the city.
The official, who did not want to be named, told the BBC: "If 106 Taliban field commanders - some of them the very backbone of the insurgency - had not escaped from the prison, attacks like this would have not occurred."
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