Five police force members were killed in an explosion on their vehicle in Chapa Dara district in Kunar province on Friday night, a provincial council member Din Mohammad said.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has suggested that Berlin’s military deployment in Afghanistan should be extended beyond its expiration in March, Germany’s dpaInternational reported. Quoted by the Funke Media Group newspapers in comments published Saturday, Maas said that the peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban will not be completed by then.

A survey by an Afghan news agency shows that the Taliban controls at least 52 percent of the country’s territory while 59 percent of the population lives in areas under the government’s control. The survey conducted by Pajhwok Afghan News shows that the Afghan government controls 46 percent of the territory.

Taliban blamed the Afghan government for prolonging violence and said it is firm in its commitments. Afghanistan’s National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib at a press briefing on Saturday said the Taliban has does not have the authority for negotiations and that group so far has shown no desire for peace and is seeking to seize absolute power.

Leader of the Hezb-e-Islami party Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said on Sunday that if government failed to abide by conditions laid out in the US-Taliban agreement, signed in February last year, there would be a revolt and the Presidential Palace would fall.

President Ashraf Ghani said Sunday that the Soviet Union troop withdrawal from Afghanistan had been “irresponsible” and without proper planning the country slid into a devastating civil war.

The enormous fire that destroyed more than 500 trucks at the Islam Qala port facility in Herat province, along the border with Iran, has left business owners reeling as financial losses are estimated to be over $50 million. The massive fire burned for over 24 hours after a fuel tanker reportedly exploded at midday on Saturday.

Two explosions of fuel tankers at the Islam Qala border crossing between Afghanistan’s western province of Herat and Iran were powerful enough to be spotted from space by NASA satellites on Saturday afternoon.

A total of 30 Taliban militants were killed after their explosive device went off inside a mosque in Dawlatabad district of the northern Balkh Province on Saturday, an Afghanistan army spokesman in the northern region, Mohammad Hanif Rezai said.

Firefighters struggled for a second day Sunday to battle a massive fire that began when a fuel tanker exploded at a major crossing in Afghanistan´s western Herat province on the Iranian border, officials said.