Khalilzad has been in Islamabad for much of the week meeting with senior government officials in what the U.S. State Department described as follow-up meetings he held in New York during last month’s U.N. General Assembly session.
The attack on the Shortepa district headquarters in northern Balkh province started early in the morning, according to Munir Ahmad Farhad, spokesman for the provincial governor.
The violence has further rattled Afghanistan which is facing an upsurge in violence after U.S.-Taliban peace talks to end America's longest war collapsed earlier this month.
Peace talks between Washington and the Taliban to reach a deal on the withdrawal of thousands of American troops collapsed last week after President Donald Trump cited an attack that killed a US soldier as his reason for pulling out of negotiations.
The insurgents explained that "a number of issues with the quality and quantity" of the ICRC's activities had led them to implement the ban in the first place.
Russian state news agency Tass cited the Taliban's Qatar-based spokesman Suhail Shaheen as saying the delegation had held consultations with Zamir Kabulov, President Vladimir Putin's envoy for Afghanistan. The visit was confirmed to the AP by a Taliban official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
Justifying the move, the president underlined that he did not want the meeting to happen under circumstances "where they (Taliban) go around and try and make themselves a little bit more important by killing a soldier and also a total of 12 people".
Trump called off a meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and senior Taliban leaders planned at his Camp David retreat on Sunday after the terror group admitted it was behind a suicide car bomb attack on Thursday that had killed an American soldier and 11 others in the capital of Kabul.
Pompeo said the Trump administration has recalled envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been negotiating with Taliban leaders for months in Qatar, and it will be up to the insurgent group whether talks will resume.
Farah provincial governor Mohammad Shoaib Sabet told The Associated Press that another 15 people were wounded in the latest attack, citing local hospitals and that airstrikes had been carried out against the militant group. Small clashes continued in the city, he said.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has refused to sign the peace deal that his special representative has inked with the Taliban, mainly because it does not guarantee the continued presence of US forces in the country to defeat al-Qaeda or the existence of the democratically elected government, a media report said Wednesday.
As the US and the Taliban close in on a deal, India on Monday said it has always supported a peace settlement in Afghanistan which will ensure stability and not leave ungoverned spaces for terrorists or their proxies to take advantage of. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale, while briefing the media on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Russia this week, said that both India and Russia believe that whatever the outcome of the discussions between the US and the Taliban is, they hope to see a stable political situation. India and Russia want to see a situation in Afghanistan where there is political order and where the peace agreement or the post-agreement process will hold.
The assault began shortly after midnight on Saturday in several parts of the city and insurgents managed to infiltrate different areas of the region before dawn, officials said.
In a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the three Congressmen also sought assurances that any deal signed would verifiably require the Taliban to break ties with all its terrorist allies, including in Pakistan, and that withdrawal of US troops will be conditioned on an agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
"We will always have intelligence, and we'll always have somebody there," Trump told reporters at his Oval Office on Tuesday.
A week before, on July 30, five persons, including two policemen, died when a powerful bomb tore through a police patrol van at a busy roundabout in Quetta.
A Taliban spokesman says the latest round of talks with the United States on a deal to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan has ended and now both sides will consult their leadership on the next steps.
At least 15 militants were killed and 10 others wounded after a military aircraft targeted a gathering of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's Takhar province on Saturday, officials said.
The Taliban on Thursday said the India-Pakistan rift over Kashmir should not be linked with the situation in Afghanistan.
The United States would press Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, who is slated to meet President Donald Trump next week, to take irreversible action against terrorist and militant groups, and to facilitate peace talks with the Taliban for intra-Afghan dialogue, the White House said on Friday.
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