A member of the Afghan security force stands on top of a concrete barrier a day after attacks outside the Afghan parliament in Kabul June 23, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

By Hamid Shalizi and Mirwais Harooni

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan government forces regained control of a key district near the northern city of Kunduz on Tuesday, after Taliban fighters had threatened to capture a provincial capital for the first time since being driven from power in 2001.

Tuesday's victory came despite signs that the Islamist militant movement was stepping up its offensive in the broader war, six months after most foreign troops left the country.

A day earlier, a Taliban car bomber and six gunmen launched a spectacular attack on the Afghan parliament in Kabul. All of the assailants were killed. One civilian also died and at least 30 people were wounded.

The violence in Kabul, Kunduz province to the north and elsewhere has put Afghanistan's security forces under more pressure than at any time since most NATO combat troops withdrew, and there appears to be no easy way out of the crisis.

"The war continues to gain intensity," said Graeme Smith, a veteran Afghan analyst at International Crisis Group.

"Even more concerning, the nature of the attacks is becoming more serious: rather than pot-shots at convoys, we're now talking about battles that last for days."

On the front lines just outside Kunduz city in the north, Afghan army and police drove the Taliban back from Chardara district, which the insurgents had captured two days before, provincial police chief Abdul Saboor Nasrati said.

"New reinforcements arrived in Kunduz from northern provinces. They have inflicted heavy casualties on the insurgents and pushed them back from Chardara district," Nasrati said.

"We are pursuing them and the gun battle is still ongoing."

The brief capture of Chardara brought fighting to a bridge just 3 km (two miles) away from the Kunduz governor's compound, raising fears that the insurgents could overrun the city center.

That would mark the first provincial capital to fall to the Taliban since U.S.-led military intervention toppled the hard-line Islamist regime, which had sheltered the al Qaeda architects of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on American cities.

"The loss of a provincial capital would have profound effects, even if the city was overrun only for a matter of hours," Smith said.

Kunduz was also under heavy threat last summer and the city center held. In the traditional Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south, insurgents threatened the provincial capital a few years ago, but were beaten back.

U.S. officials in Washington said it was unlikely Kunduz would fall into Taliban hands, and disputed the idea that recent attacks signified the insurgents were gaining ground against NATO-trained Afghan forces.

"Although the insurgents have executed a number of violent attacks since the announcement of the 2015 fighting season, including the attack on parliament, the (Afghan security forces) have demonstrated their growing capability to provide security," a State Department spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington; Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

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More than 500 people have died from a three-day heatwave in southern Pakistan, officials said Tuesday, as medics battled to treat victims after a state of emergency was declared in hospitals.

The majority of the deaths occurred in the port city of Karachi, Pakistan's economic hub of around 20 million people, where temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit) at the weekend, said Sabir Memon, a senior provincial health official.

"The number of people who have died due to the heatwave in government hospitals is now more than 500. The death toll may go up," he said.

The deaths came as the overwhelmingly Muslim country of around 200 million people observes the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, during which eating and drinking is forbidden from sunrise to sunset.

Semi Jamali, a doctor at Karachi's largest hospital said they had treated about 3000 patients.

"More than 200 of them were either received dead or died in hospital," Jamali told AFP.

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A resident helps a heatstroke victim at a market area during a heatwave in Karachi on June 23, 2015 …

Pakistan's largest charity, Edhi Welfare Organisation, said their two morgues in the city had received more than 400 corpses.

"More than 400 dead bodies have so far been received in our two mortuaries in the past three days," Edhi spokesman Anwar Kazmi told AFP. "The mortuaries have reached capacity."

Electricity shortages have crippled the water supply system in Karachi, hampering the pumping of millions of gallons of water to consumers, the state-run water utility said.

Pakistan's Meteorological Office said temperatures remained at around 44.5 Celsius in Karachi on Tuesday but forecast thunderstorms for the evening.

"Due to a low depression developing in the Arabian sea, thunderstorms will likely begin this evening and might continue for the next three days," a Meteorological official told AFP.

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A man carries a heatstroke victim to a hospital in Karachi, southern Pakistan on June 23, 2015 (AFP …

The provincial government meanwhile announced a public holiday to encourage residents to stay inside, an official said. Many of the victims have been labourers who toil outdoors.

Some residents also took to hosing each other down with water on Tuesday to avoid collapsing from heat stroke.

- Clerics react -

Tahir Ashrafi, a prominent Islamic cleric, urged those who were at risk of heat stroke to abstain from fasting.

"We (religious scholars) have highlighted on various television channels that those who are at risk, especially in Karachi where there is a very serious situation, should abstain from fasting," he said.

"Islam has drawn conditions for fasting, it is even mentioned in the holy Koran that patients and travellers who are not able to bear fasting can delay it and people who are weak or old and are at risk of falling sick or even dying because of fasting should abstain," he added.

An official from the National Disaster Management Authority told AFP heat stroke treatment centres would be established at all hospitals across the province to provide " emergency medicines for heat stroke victims".

The deaths come a month after neighbouring India suffered a deadly heatwave, with more than 2,000 deaths.

Hundreds of mainly poor people die at the height of summer every year in India, but this year's toll was the second highest in the country's history.

A boy stands on a balcony at a site hit by what activists said was a barrel bomb dropped by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in al-Kalaseh neighbourhood of Aleppo, Syria June 21, 2015. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail -

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) - Syrian government forces have dropped barrel bombs on Aleppo nearly daily this year, amounting to the war crime of targeting civilians, and insurgent shelling has caused mass casualties, U.N. investigators said on Tuesday.

Both the military and rebel groups, including Islamic State, have imposed sieges to "devastating effect", depriving residents of food and medicine and leading to malnutrition and starvation, they said in their latest report.

"The government's campaign of shelling and aerial bombardment sits alongside the besieging of areas and the arrest and disappearance of predominantly fighting-age males from restive areas at its checkpoints," Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the U.N. commission of inquiry, told the Human Rights Council.

"Shelling of civilian-inhabited areas by non-state armed groups - including but not limited to ISIS, Jabat al-Nusra and

Jaysh Al-Islam - have terrorized men, women and children living in localities held by the government," he said.

More than 220,000 people have been killed in the four-year conflict which 4 million refugees have fled.

This year, government planes and helicopters have bombarded areas of eastern Aleppo province, "mostly barrel bombings - on a nearly daily basis," the independent experts said. Its bombing of towns and cities in Deraa and Idlib had also intensified.

"The continuing use of barrel bombs in aerial campaigns against whole areas, rather than specific targets, is in violation of international humanitarian law and, as previously documented, amounts to the war crime of targeting civilians," the report said.

The investigators, who have drawn up five confidential lists of suspected war criminals on all sides, warned: "The flight paths of helicopters responsible for the dropping of barrel bombs are being documented. Those in command of the bases and airstrips where helicopters are loaded and from where they take off must be held accountable."

Syrian Ambassador Hussam Eddin Aala rejected the inquiry's findings about government practices, adding:

"The terrorist group ISIS has committed massacres in Palmyra and caused deaths and injury of hundreds of people, however these crimes don't seem to have found their way into report."

Aala accused the U.N. investigators of "collusion and bias" for failing to denounce Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar for supporting rebels fighting to topple President Bashir al-Assad.

U.S. ambassador Keith Harper denounced the Damascus government's use of barrel bombs and imprisonment of "tens of thousands of Syrians, subjecting them to torture, sexual violence, inhumane conditions and denial of fair trials".

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

A North Carolina man was charged today with planning to gun down “a large number of citizens” in attacks to support ISIS here in the United States, authorities said.

Ironically, it was the suspect’s father who first alerted authorities to his son’s ISIS sympathies. As a result, 19-year-old Justin Sullivan was arrested over Father’s Day weekend.

The criminal complaint charges that Justin Sullivan planned to buy a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle at the Hickory, North Carolina gun show, and use it to kill people “at a bar or concert." Sullivan was arrested at his home in Morganton this past Friday and in a subsequent interview with the FBI, admitted that he looked online for nearby places to attack.

Authorities said Sullivan allegedly had plans for a “mass attack, while the criminal complaint states that authorities believe Justin Sullivan was radicalized by watching ISIS videos on social media.

Sullivan is charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to ISIS, one count of transporting and receiving a silencer in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony, and one count of receipt and possession of an unregistered silencer, unidentified by a serial number. The charge of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign organization carries a maximum potential penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The FBI first became aware of Justin Sullivan in April, when his father called 911, saying, “I don’t know if it is ISIS or what, but he (Justin Sullivan) is destroying Buddhas, and figurines and stuff."

In June, an FBI undercover officer made contact with him, and Sullivan told him he had converted to Islam, and was a “mujahid,” authorities said.

Sullivan told the undercover agent he should get “an AR-15 with split core ammo ... it’s fragmenting hollow points ... deadly,” authorities said.

He also wanted the undercover to “just kill a few people so that I know you are truthful," according to authorities.

Federal investigators said that among the people he wanted killed were his own parents. Sullivan also asked the undercover FBI agent to help him make a homemade silencer, and he made grandiose plans for a mass attack.

According to the charging document, Sullivan wrote the undercover officer, “500 is an incorrect body count." He said 1,000 was correct, “I’m thinking about using biological weapons ... coat our bullets with cyanide ... and then set off a gas bomb to finish the rest.”

In one of his last conversations with the undercover agent, authorities said Sullivan talked about a second attack, “we could use a U-Haul packed with bombs and then detonate it."