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An Afghan security official at a checkpoint in Helmand on Tuesday, hours after the fatal attacks on police.

KABUL After 16 years, Afghanistans long war shows no sign of taking a day off, even in midwinter.

On Tuesday, 11 police officers were killed in a Taliban attack in the south, but that was only one in a long and not unusual series of assaults against Afghan security forces.

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In recent weeks, there have been several attacks in which two or three Afghan police officers were killed.

Last year, 10 police officers were killed in one attack, a few days after 17 were killed. On Jan. 31, the Taliban tunneled under an army post in Sangin district and blew up the facility, killing as many as 20 soldiers.

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On the face of it, no single attack was that significant in the context of Afghanistans long and drawn out conflict. But the steady accumulation of attacks is a relentless reminder of what it is to be a country torn by war.

Winter is no longer the total respite from fighting that it once was. Huge numbers of people are affected.

Just during January, 22,000 Afghans were displaced by conflict throughout the country, according to United Nations figures. In all of 2016, that figure was 600,000.

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The killings of the police officers on Tuesday took place in the southern province of Helmand, which has for the last year been the most violent place in Afghanistan.

The Taliban control most of the province, with the government holding on to the provincial capital and crucial strong points, often with the help of heavy US airstrikes.

In the attack, according to Gulai Khan, the police security chief for the province, the Taliban overran a police guard post on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, after a heavy firefight, killing the 11 officers there. They blew up the post and took the victims weapons, he said.

Not far away, on Highway 1, which links Helmand to Kandahar, the second-largest city in Afghanistan, a police convoy on Tuesday struck a hidden roadside bomb that killed one policeman and wounded three others, according to Omar Zwak, the spokesman for the Helmand governor.

Highway 1 is a 1,400-mile-long ring road that circles Afghanistan and connects most of its major cities.

Built by Western donors at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is a vital commercial and strategic artery but one that has rarely been free of attacks along large stretches of its route.

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Taliban kill 11 police officers in southern Afghanistan - The Boston Globe