KABUL — Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan have taken over most of the rural areas in Ghazni province and continue to battle the government for control of the provincial capital, according to local officials and residents.

While attention in the past four days has focused primarily on the fight for Ghazni city, where the Taliban appear to control most neighborhoods, the insurgents have also taken over at least four more rural districts in the province, mostly without much of a fight. The city is about 90 miles southwest of Kabul.

They have also consolidated their authority in other districts, as local government officials fled.

By Monday, only two of the province’s 18 rural districts were fully in government control. That raised the prospect that if the insurgents did fully take the city, they might also be in a position to control an entire province for the first time in the 17-year war in Afghanistan.

The government said it was sending 1,000 more troops to join the battle to recapture Ghazni. The Afghan soldiers and police are being supported by US airstrikes and some US ground forces.

In the city Monday, government forces said they had control of government buildings, the police headquarters and prison, and military bases.

Officials and residents disputed Taliban claims that those facilities had fallen Monday, but residents described the government buildings as under constant attack.

Some residents fled, but most remained in their homes.

“For three days now, our home has been the battlefield of the Taliban and we are living amid smoke and gunfire,’’ said Mohammad Halim, whose house is close to the city center, with its government buildings. “Many times we tried to escape our own home, but moving is so difficult. If we stay here, we will starve.’’

Shops and businesses were closed Monday and the United Nations’ acting humanitarian coordinator in Kabul, Rik Peeperkorn, warned of an approaching crisis.

“Vital telecommunications networks and the electricity supply are down in the city of 270,000 people, which has impacted on the water supply, and food is also reportedly running low,’’ he said.

On Sunday, the director of the hospital in Ghazni, Baz Mohammad Hemat, said that 113 bodies had been brought there over the three days since the fighting started, mostly uniformed members of security forces, as well as 142 wounded.

Hemat could not be reached Monday. At a news conference in Kabul, Interior Minister Wais Ahmad Barmak said that 70 police officers had been killed in the past four days.

While government officials said they had the city under control and were carrying out “clearance operations’’ against Taliban hiding places, residents said there were no signs the Taliban fighters were being pushed out.

General Mohammad Sharif Yaftali, the army chief of staff, said “the reason for slow operations is to prevent civilian casualties and financial losses to the residents.’’ He added that roads would be reopened and that the city would return to full government control by Tuesday.

The insurgents have been attacking throughout the province. On Friday, a devastating strike on an Afghan commando base in the district of Ajristan, sent defenders fleeing, with as many as 100 commandos and police officers killed, according to a senior Afghan official.

On Saturday, a New York Times reporter saw insurgents taking over government facilities in Khwaja Omari district, just north of Ghazni.

On Sunday, the Taliban took over the huge and remote district of Nawur, in the northwest of the province, according to Hamidullah Nawroz, a provincial councilman from Ghazni.

On Monday, the Taliban claimed they had taken control of Jaghatu, in the northeast of the province; Amanullah Kamrani, a deputy chairman of the Ghazni Provincial Council, confirmed the news. The insurgents also claimed that they had taken Dih Yak district, in eastern Ghazni, but that could not be independently confirmed.

Seven of Ghazni’s districts had effectively already been under insurgent control before the current fighting.

Governor Arif Rezaie confirmed he had moved his government from Rashidan district to the neighboring Jaghatu. One week before the attack on Ghazni city, his chief of police was killed in a Taliban attack. A new one had just been appointed when the attack on the city took place.

On Friday, the Taliban targeted Jaghatu, too. Rezaie said he had been on a business trip to Kabul at the time. His government colleagues and the new police chief and other officers quickly relocated to Nawabad, north of Ghazni city. But the Taliban took over that neighborhood Saturday.

“From that time until now, I am not able to reach my new police chief and his 20 men,’’ Rezaie said. “They are missing and most probably they have disintegrated as a unit and hid themselves in people’s homes.’’

In Washington, the Pentagon reported that Sergeant Reymund Rarogal Transfiguracion, 36, died Sunday after being injured last week by a roadside bomb in southern Helmand province.

Transfiguracion, of Waikoloa, Hawaii, was a Special Forces soldier working alongside Afghan commandos when he was hit by the blast, which also wounded several Afghans and at least one other American, military officials said.

Five US troops have been killed this year in combat in Afghanistan.