Two police officers and at least 11 Taliban militants were killed in fierce clashes after Taliban attacked a security checkpoint in Afghanistan's western province of Badghis Tuesday, a local official said.

"The clashes occurred in the early hours of Tuesday after Taliban attacked the checkpoint with guns and rocket propelled grenades, along a main roadway in Laman, an area on the outskirts of provincial capital Qala-e-Naw city," Naqibullah Amini, the provincial police spokesman, told Xinhua.

Four police personnel and 16 Taliban were also wounded in the fighting which lasted for hours, the source added.

Reinforcement forces were dispatched to the area and the security troops seized weapons after the fighting in the province, 555 km northwest of Kabul.

In a separate development, militants kidnapped four people after intercepting a bus and singling them out from among the passengers in Maywand district of southern Kandahar province earlier on Tuesday.

The police launched a search raid to locate and rescue the kidnapped passangers, Bashir Khaqsar, an official of provincial police department, told Xinhua.

The Taliban-led insurgency has been on the rampage since the beginning of 2015 when the Afghan security forces assumed full responsibilities of security from the U.S. and NATO troops.

The militants also intensified attacks against security forces and staged coordinated large-scale attacks against Afghan cities and districts after they launched a yearly rebel offensive on April 25.