The Taliban said Friday it has conveyed to the United States the insurgent group is not holding an American hostage missing in Afghanistan.

A roadside bombing in a remote area in southwestern Pakistan, close to the border with Iran, struck a patrol vehicle on Friday, killing six soldiers, including an army major, the military said.

Another influential family was split by the war when a retired province police chief defected to the insurgency. His son remains deputy governor. As a onetime police chief of the restive province of Farah in western Afghanistan, Gen. Abdul Jalil Bakhtawar was a dogged enemy of the Taliban.

The Taliban attacked an Afghan army checkpoint in eastern Laghman province, killing six soldiers and wounding five, the government said Monday.

Separate attacks in Pakistan’s restive southwestern Baluchistan province killed seven troops, officials said Tuesday. An eight soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in the country’s northwest.

Afghan security forces on Tuesday repelled a fierce Taliban attack on Kunduz, officials said, a strategic city in northern Afghanistan that had briefly fallen to the militants twice in the past.

A car bomb attack on an intelligence base in central Ghazni province in Afghanistan early Monday morning killed at least seven members of the security forces and wounded 40 others.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani signed a power-sharing deal with his rival Abdullah Abdullah Sunday, marking a possible end to months of post-presidential-election turmoil and years of political tug of war between the two camps.

Bottom Line Up Front Devastating terrorist attacks in Afghanistan earlier this week shocked the country, including an attack on a maternity ward in Kabul and another at a funeral procession in Nangahar.

In a major international espionage racket, Pakistani spies recruited agents in the defence establishment of India to collect sensitive and classified information regarding Indian warships, submarines, and data on the location of naval commands. Navy personnel were also accused of spying for Pakistan.