Two Canadian soldiers and 35 Taliban militants were killed in the latest violence to rock insurgency-hit southern Afghanistan, officials said on Thursday.
The Islamist Taliban fighters were killed late on Wednesday in fierce fighting with Afghan and United States-led troops in troubled Zabul province, provincial governor’s spokesperson Gulab Shah Alikhil told Agence France-Presse.
”Initially our troops came under attack. They called for support from the coalition troops who responded with ground troops and air support. Thirty-five Taliban were killed in the subsequent fighting,” Alikhil said.
The US-led coalition headquarters said it had no immediate information on the incident, while the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said it was not involved.
Zabul is one of the most violent regions in southern Afghanistan. Four Afghan soldiers were killed and nearly two dozen wounded in the province after being ambushed by Taliban insurgents on Monday.
Taliban rebels seized control of Khak Afghan district in Zabul last week, the latest of several rebel attempts to exert control in parts of southern and western Afghanistan.
Separately on Wednesday two Canadian soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb near their vehicle, as the bodies of six of their comrades who died days earlier in a similar attack were returning home for burial, officials said.
The latest blast about 38km west of the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, also wounded two soldiers, one seriously, Canadian National Defence spokesperson John Knoll said in Ottawa.
A third soldier was also wounded in an earlier bomb attack in the same area, he added.
And a suicide bombing of a Canadian convoy west of Kandahar wounded 10 Afghan civilians and caused minor damage to a vehicle earlier on Wednesday, Knoll said, updating the number of injured from eight.
Canada has deployed 2 500 soldiers in southern Afghanistan as part of the 37 000-strong Isaf contingent that is supporting the government of President Hamid Karzai. Separately there are around 11 000 US-led coalition troops.
The latest casualties bring the Canadian military death toll in Afghanistan to 53 since the start of their mission in 2002.
On April 8, Easter Sunday, Canada suffered its heaviest single-day troop loss in 50 years with the death of six soldiers outside Kandahar, as the nation marked the 90th anniversary of a key World War I victory in Vimy, France.
Around 1 000 people, the majority of them militants, have been killed in Taliban-related violence this year, according to an Agence France-Presse toll based on official reports. Last year was the bloodiest since 2001 with around 4 000 dead.
The fundamentalist Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and were ousted by US-led forces in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on the United States, but have since regrouped to lead a bloody insurgency.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates announced on Wednesday that army soldiers will see their tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq extended by three months in a sign that the US military is straining to meet its commitments. – AFP
