Afghan and Nato-led troops, backed by air power, killed at least 12 Taliban fighters and wounded another 15 in an operation in southern Afghanistan, a Defence Ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.
Mostly Canadian Nato troops and Taliban insurgents have been engaged in fierce fighting in the Zherai district, west of the biggest southern city of Kandahar, for more than a year with each side seizing then losing the same ground several times.
The apparent stalemate is typical of that across Afghanistan where insurgents are incapable of capturing and holding any towns, but Afghan and Western forces have not been able to clear insurgents from many remote regions either.
”There are 12 bodies on the ground, but blood traces indicate that there are more than 12 Taliban killed in the operation,” said Defence Ministry spokesperson Zaher Murad. ”It seems the Taliban have taken away their dead from the battleground.”
Many Taliban had been killed or wounded in the operation which began on Saturday. Nato forces have called in airstrikes against insurgent positions and fighting was still going on, Kandahar provincial police chief said.
”We don’t know exactly how many Taliban fighters were killed at the moment, but there are many killed and wounded,” said the provincial police chief, Sayed Aqa Saqib.
Clashes
The Taliban commander in the area, Mullah Ulfat, said six of his fighters had been killed and three wounded but the rebels had inflicted heavy casualties on Afghan and foreign forces.
”There are only 15 Taliban killed, no more,” said a Esah Khan, a local elder.
Meanwhile, a suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into a convoy of foreign forces in the Girishk district of Helmand province on Sunday but no-one was wounded, provincial police chief Hussain Andiwal said.
No one was wounded in the attack, he said.
The target of the attack was a United States Humvee, a spokesperson for Nato forces said, and it was not clear if it was a suicide attack or not, but no one was injured.
Elsewhere, two Afghan policemen and three insurgents were killed when the Taliban attacked a police patrol in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni province, south-west of Kabul, the local intelligence chief, Mohammad Zamaan, said.
Further south, 11 insurgents and one Afghan soldier were killed when Taliban attacked a joint foreign and Afghan military convoy in the Shah Joy district of Zabul province on Saturday, said Qasim Khan, a police official in the district.
More than 7 000 people have been killed since the hardline Islamist Taliban relaunched their insurgency to topple the pro-Western Afghan government and eject the more than 50 000 foreign troops from the country. – Reuters