About 60 fleeing Taliban guerrillas were confirmed dead after their boat sank in a river in southern Afghanistan, the Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
”According to reports we received, all of them on board were Taliban and were killed,” Defence Ministry spokesperson General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters.
He told Agence France-Presse on Saturday the ministry was investigating if the
roughly 60 people on board the boat that sank in the southern province of Helmand on Friday had drowned, and who they were.
”They were Taliban,” Azimi told a media briefing on Sunday, adding efforts by military forces to recover many bodies from the river had failed.
”But we still continue to recover as many bodies as possible,” he said.
The rebels had been fleeing military forces around the Kajaki district, where Afghan security forces and foreign troops have been fighting them since early March in an operation called Achilles.
”They were running from our troops to safe places across the river,” the spokesperson added.
He said on Friday that the military had ”observed from the air that Taliban got on board the boat. It sunk as it was crossing the river.”
People usually cross the river, one of the biggest in Afghanistan, in makeshift boats made from tyre tubes and wooden planks. The militants were on such a vessel, Azimi said.
Taliban are particularly active in Helmand province, where the rebels are said to be allied with opium traffickers.
The Helmand river, also called Hari Rud, runs through some of Afghanistan’s main poppy-cultivating regions. The province provides almost half of the more than 6 000 tonnes of opium produced in Afghanistan every year.
Azimi said operations aimed at rooting out rebels in the region were continuing ”with great success”, with more than 20 Taliban rebels killed this week.
About 5 500 Afghan, Nato-led and US-led coalition forces are involved in Achilles.
But despite their efforts, the Taliban remain active and are holding at least one district in the province. – Sapa-AFP