A group of suicide bombers armed with explosive-laden vests, automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades stormed a government compound Thursday in western Afghanistan, killing at least seven people, officials said.

One of attackers first blew himself up at the gate of the governor's complex in Farah province, then three others fought their way inside, said Raouf Ahmadi, the regional police spokesman.

An ensuing two-hour gunbattle with the police left all the attackers dead, Ahmadi said. He said six policemen and one civilian were also killed in the attack, while another 12 people were wounded.

Government offices are a common target for militants in Afghanistan. Last month two Taliban fighters smuggled guns into the governor's compound in Kandahar, sparking a gunbattle in which two guards and both attackers were killed.

Elsewhere, Taliban militants attacked a NATO supply convoy overnight in Herat province. Provincial police spokesman Raouf Ahmadi said one police officer, two security guards and a militant were killed in the fighting.

 One of the most powerful men on the Taliban council, Agha Jan Motasim, nearly lost his life in a hail of bullets for advocating a negotiated settlement that would bring a broad-based government to his beleaguered homeland of Afghanistan.

In an exclusive and rare interview by a member of the so-called Quetta Shura, Motasim told The Associated Press Sunday that a majority of Taliban wants a peace settlement and that there are only "a few" hard-liners in the movement.

"There are two kinds of Taliban. The one type of Taliban who believes that the foreigners want to solve the problem but there is another group and they don't believe, and they are thinking that the foreigners only want to fight," he said by telephone. "I can tell you, though, that the majority of the Taliban and the Taliban leadership want a broad-based government for all Afghan people and an Islamic system like other Islamic countries."

But Motasim chastised the West, singling out the United States and Britain, for failing to bolster the moderates within the fundamentalist Islamic movement by refusing to recognize the Taliban as a political identity and backtracking on promises __ all of which he said strengthens the hard-liners and weakens moderates like himself.

He lamented Sunday's assassination in Kabul of Arsala Rahmani, a member of the Afghan government-appointed peace council who was active in trying to set up formal talks with insurgents. Rahmani served as deputy minister of higher education in the former Taliban regime but later reconciled with the current Afghan government.

"He was a nationalist. We respected him," Motasim said.

Motasim used his own stature to press for talks nearly three years before the United States began making overtures to the Taliban in late 2010. At the time, he was also chief of the Taliban political committee, a powerful position that he held until he was shot last August. He is still a member of the Taliban leadership council, the Quetta Shura, named after the Pakistani city of the same name.

His voice softened and he paused often as he reflected on the brutal shooting in the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, where he lived, while moving regularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan in areas that he refused to identify.

Several bullets shattered his body and he was hospitalized for many weeks. In the first days after the shooting, he wasn't expected to survive.

The AP spoke to Motasim from Turkey where he had gone for additional treatment. When speaking of his attackers, he referred to them as brothers and colleagues, saying they may have been Taliban hard-liners who opposed his moderate positions.

"My idea was I wanted a broad-based government, all political parties together and maybe some hard-liners among the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan didn't like to hear this and so they attacked me," he said. Some of the gunmen may have come from Afghanistan and some may have been from Pakistan's North Waziristan where militant groups have found sanctuary, Motasim said.

In the early minutes of the telephone conversation, Motasim was reluctant to talk politics, saying he had been told by his friends and colleagues to stay silent.

"I am not involved in any talks. I am only here for my treatment," he said.

But he gradually opened up, saying the Taliban have three main demands: They want all Afghan prisoners released from U.S.-run detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and near Bagram Air Field north of the Afghan capital; the names of all Taliban currently on the United Nations sanctions blacklist removed; and recognition of the Taliban as a political party.

He said talks in Qatar ended earlier this year after the United States reneged on a promise to release five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. "But those are just the famous ones," he said. "There are thousands more being held in Bagram and they are being held under the name of Taliban but they are innocent people, farmers and clerics."

The prisoner exchange issue is rife with sensitivity as the United States has sought to exchange American Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, captured by the Taliban in 2009, for Afghan Taliban held in Guantanamo. It appears the prisoner exchange fell through after the Afghan authorities demanded the five prisoners be repatriated to Afghanistan, according to an Afghan official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to brief the media. The five prisoners have demanded they be allowed to go to Qatar with their families.

Motasim said he wasn't told why the prisoners were not released but when they weren't the hard-liners among the Taliban took it as a sign that the United States was disingenuous, said Motasim, who acknowledged that the Taliban have set up an office in Qatar.

He said the office has no official recognition as a political headquarters of the Taliban, rather it has been veiled in secrecy and the American interlocutors are engaging with them as insurgents not political representatives of at least some Afghans. Motasim said most of the Taliban who were negotiating with the Americans are on the U.N. sanctions list.

The U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions against the Taliban in November 1999 for refusing to send Osama bin Laden to the United States or a third country for trial on terrorism charges in connection with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The sanctions — a travel ban, arms embargo and assets freeze — were later extended to al-Qaida. In July 2005, the council extended the sanctions again to cover affiliates and splinter groups of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

"They (the U.S.) have to give political independence to the Taliban," he said.

Looking ahead to next week's NATO summit in Chicago, Motasim said he had a message for participants.

"The decisions of NATO should be for the good of Afghanistan and should not call for more violence. It should call for an end to the fighting, an end to the raids and killings," he said. "Afghanistan is destroyed, the people are displaced, refugees, poor people are dying in their homes and also foreigners are dying here. It should end."

 An assassin armed with a silenced pistol shot dead a top member of the Afghan peace council Sunday at a traffic intersection in the nation's capital, police said. The killing strikes another blow to efforts to negotiate a political resolution to the decade-long war.

Arsala Rahmani was a former Taliban official who reconciled with the government and was active in trying to set up formal talks with the insurgents.

He was shot at an intersection in western Kabul by a gunman in a white Toyota Corolla while being driven to his office, said Mohammad Zahir, head of the city police's criminal investigation division. He did not have a bodyguard with him at the time.

"Only one shot was fired," Zahir said. "Our initial reports are that it was a pistol with a silencer. Rahmani died on the way to the hospital." Zahir said an investigation was under way.

The Taliban denied responsibility for the killing, although they had earlier indicated that they would target peace negotiators.

Rahmani was one of about 70 influential Afghans and former Taliban appointed by President Hamid Karzai to try to convince insurgent leaders to reconcile with the government.

The U.S. has backed the council's efforts to pull the Taliban into political discussions with Kabul as part of its strategy for reducing violence and turning over responsibility to Afghan forces so international combat troops can go home or move into support roles by the end of 2014.

But this effort suffered a major setback in September 2011 when former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was head of the peace council, was assassinated by a suicide bomber posing as a peace emissary from the Taliban.

The U.S. has its own contacts with the Taliban, but in March the militant organization said they were suspending contacts with the United States over what they said was a lack of progress in releasing Taliban prisoners from U.S. detention in Guantanamo.

The last substantive discussions between U.S. officials and Taliban representatives were in January, and both initiatives to build trust and move toward real peace talks are in limbo.

A year ago, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States was launching a "diplomatic surge to move this conflict toward a political outcome."

The alternative to a political resolution is a protracted conflict that neither the war-weary Afghans, Americans or Europeans want or can afford.

On Twitter, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul called the assassination of another peace council member "a tragedy."

NATO praised Rahmani for "turning his back" on the insurgent movement and said his contributions will be missed.

"The only possible aim of this attack is to intimidate those, who like Rahmani, want to help make Afghanistan a better place for its citizens and the region," the coalition said in a statement.

Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai said work toward reconciliation with the Taliban would continue despite Rahmani's killing.

"No one but the sworn enemies of peace in Afghanistan and the region would commit such a heinous act," he said in a statement.

Rahmani, who was in his 70s, served as deputy minister of higher education during the Taliban regime, which ruled Afghanistan for five years and sheltered al-Qaida before being driven out of power in the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001. He reconciled with the government established in Kabul after the Taliban's fall and subsequently served in parliament.

Rahmani was one of several former members of the Taliban who were removed from a U.N. blacklist in July 2011. The decision by a U.N. committee eliminated a travel ban and an assets freeze against Rahmani and the others — a move seen as key to promoting the peace effort.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement that his group had nothing to do with Rahmani's assassination.

When they announced the start of their annual "spring offensive" earlier this month, the Taliban said that members of the peace council — who they view as government collaborators — would be among their primary targets.

The offensive, which comes every year as the weather warms, normally leads to an increase in attacks as the insurgents seek to intimidate the government and retake territory lost over the winter.

Publicly, the leadership of the Taliban has said that it will not talk to the Afghan government, which it calls a puppet regime of the U.S. and its international partners. Privately, however, some representatives of the Taliban who are open to negotiating a settlement have met with U.S., Afghan and other international officials.

Rahmani, along with other members of the peace council, was trying to forge relations with those Taliban amenable to peace talks.

NATO says a bomb attack has
killed one of its service members in southern Afghanistan, while another has died of
non-battle related injuries.

NATO provided no other details about Saturday's deaths, including the
nationalities of the troops. The coalition normally waits for member nations to
provide those details.

Elsewhere, the spokesman for the governor of the northwestern province of
Badghis says four police officers were killed Saturday when their vehicle was
hit by a roadside bomb in Qadis district.

So far this month, 16 NATO service members have been killed in Afghanistan.