KABUL, Sept 21: A French soldier died in a suicide blast in Kabul and around 40 Taliban militants were killed elsewhere on Friday as hundreds of Afghans rallied for an end to violence on the UN’s International Day of Peace.

An Afghan official said meanwhile that six civilians had been killed earlier in the week in an airstrike by NATO-led forces against extremist fighters.

Thursday was also a day of bloodshed, with a Dutch soldier and three dozen Taliban killed in the insurgency-torn south.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the Kabul suicide attack, the first inside the barricaded capital in three weeks.

The French military, which has around 1,000 soldiers in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), confirmed that its soldiers were struck while on patrol and that one died.

Eight Afghan civilians were injured in the blast, ISAF said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his condolences to all the victims, adding in a statement that he was “more determined than ever to continue the fight against terrorism”. Around 168 international soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year -- the bloodiest since the insurgent Taliban were removed from government in late 2001. France has lost 12 troops since deploying to the country.

One side of the armoured vehicle struck by the blast was damaged but the car that carried the bomb was completely destroyed, reduced to a heap of blackened metal.

The attacker’s flesh littered the site, his torso flung metres away.

There have been more than 100 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year, most of them blamed on the Taliban’s intensifying insurgency, which sees almost daily attacks in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

Soldiers led by the US military struck militant hideouts in the volatile south early Friday, killing about 40 rebels and destroying one of the largest caches of weapons they have ever found, the US-led coalition said.

The operation was in the southern province of Helmand, Afghanistan’s top opium-growing area, which sees some of the heaviest fighting of the Taliban’s anti-government insurgency, funded in part by the drugs trade.

The coalition operates alongside the 37-nation NATO deployment and Afghan security forces.

NATO admitted separately that it had killed civilians in the course of a new anti-Taliban operation launched in Helmand on Wednesday.—AFP