July 4, 2003	Friday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 3,1424

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KABUL, July 3: Ten Taliban fighters were killed on Thursday in fighting in southern Afghanistan as the rebels tried to retreat after four days of clashes with government forces, a provincial official said.

About 60 Taliban fighters managed to slip out of the Ata Ghar mountains in Zabul province and moved into neighbouring Kandahar province where government forces confronted them, said Khalid Pashtun, a spokesman for Kandahar’s governor.

Pashtun said 10 Taliban were killed and 16 wounded in the fighting.

He had no further details of the fighting in Marouf district, which is near the border with Pakistan.

Southern Afghanistan is one of the most volatile parts of the country and some provincial officials have said Taliban remnants are regrouping along the border with Pakistan.

A US military spokesman said US forces were not involved in the fighting.

“If the Taliban is beginning to come back into this area that is, of course, of interest to us and we’ll be looking into it but we don’t have specific details,” Lt Col Douglas Lefforge told reporters at the US military headquarters at Bagram, north of Kabul.

Afghan government officials say remnants of Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies are plotting attacks on Afghan and US-led troops and foreign aid workers from the safety of the Pakistan side of the border.

NGOs TARGETED: Rockets were fired at a road construction crew in southern Afghanistan while separately police seized three Taliban who said they were under instructions from their teachers in Pakistan to target non-government organizations, a minister said on Thursday.

The workers on the main road to Kandahar came under rocket attack earlier this week near Ghazni, 170km south of Kabul, Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali told reporters at a press conference.

There were no casualties, he said.

Meanwhile, just south of Ghazni three suspected Taliban carjacked a vehicle with two Afghans working for an NGO also involved in road construction, he said, adding that there were no foreigners in the car at the time.

The workers were tied up and left behind while the trio made off with the car. Police later found them and the car in Giru, 50km south of Ghazni.

“The three carjackers proved to be Taliban,” Jalali said.

“They had instructions from their leaders in Quetta and Chaman in Pakistan and they said they were targeting NGOs in order to create an environment of mistrust and insecurity in the country.”

He said teachers in their madrassas (religious schools) in Quetta and Chaman, just over the border in Pakistan, had told them to go to Afghanistan.

Deminers had been working to clear the road between Kabul and the main southern city of Kandahar to allow renovation of the badly damaged major highway.—AFP