KANDAHAR, July 2: Thirty-one people, most of them Taliban guerillas, have been killed in new battles in southern Afghanistan, an official said on Saturday. The latest casualties in Uruzgan province increased the death toll in the region to 47 within a week.
Four security personnel were killed and a senior police official wounded on Saturday when a roadside bomb tore through their 20-vehicle convoy in southeastern Paktika province, provincial governor Gulab Mangal said.
Uruzgan governor Jan Mohammad Khan said 25 guerillas and six policemen were killed as more than 100 policemen swarmed through Tagab village and clashed with militants on Friday.
Four policemen and five suspected Taliban were killed in a Taliban attack on a police check post in the early hours of Friday morning and another 20 militants and two policemen were killed in clashes later that day, he added.
“Now we’ve 25 Taliban killed in the fighting — 20 of them later Friday afternoon,” he said, adding another militant was captured.
The governor said the hunt for the guerillas was continuing.
Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi, a spokesman for the Taliban, confirmed the Fighting, but said the militants had lost only six of their colleagues.
“We killed 14 police on Friday morning — the government attacked us in the afternoon in which we lost six of our mujahideen,” he said.
The village in Uruzgan’s Charchino district has been the scene of bloody clashes between police and the ousted militia in the past week.
Separately, US and Afghan troops patrolling near Kandahar, which is south of Uruzgan, killed two “enemies”, wounded another and captured two more after being attacked with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, a US military statement said.
The incident followed another firefight near Kandahar on Thursday which left a militant dead.
AIR STRIKES: US warplanes bombed militants in eastern Afghanistan, the US military said on Saturday, as the search continued for a special forces team that disappeared five days ago during a rescue attempt in which a US helicopter was shot down.
“We had an air strike target an enemy compound on Kunar, which in our assessment we had to hit immediately,” spokesman Lt Col Jerry O’Hara said.
“The bombardment was done using precision guided munitions,” he added.—AFP
