60 insurgents killed in Afghanistan operation

KABUL—A NATO and Afghan operation that has now ended killed more than 60 Taliban-linked rebels over six days, a provincial governor said, adding that Chechen and Arab fighters were among the dead.
The operation was near the border with Pakistan in the province of Paktika, which has recently seen significant security force action against militants, some of whom have admitted to infiltrating from across the border.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed it had been involved in the operation in Barmal district of Paktika. While it did not have an assessment of the casualties, it did not dispute the Afghan official’s figures, spokesman Major Luke Knittig said.
“Over 60 Taliban have been killed in operations launched six days ago that ended today,” Paktika governor Muhammad Akram Khoplwak told AFP. ISAF troops and air power assisted the local forces, he said Sunday.
The number of dead was estimated from surveillance and from bodies left behind after the clashes, he said. The Taliban, which launched an insurgency after being removed from government in 2001, are thought to have removed some of their dead from the battle sites.
“There were Arabs and Chechens and other foreign fighters among those killed. A number of weapons and missiles have been seized,” Khoplwak said. Barmal has seen major fighting in the past weeks, with 24 militants killed in a single battle there a month ago. Afghan army officials said those men were also of different nationalities, including Chechens, Pakistanis and Turks.
Some of the captured fighters said mullahs in Pakistan had persuaded them it was their Islamic duty to go into Afghanistan to fight foreign troops because they were invading “infidels”.
Kabul has been pushing Islamabad to do more against extremist groups in Pakistan which are said to train Islamist fighters in madrassas and then send them to fight in Afghanistan, where there are about 40,000 foreign troops and the government is backed by the United States.
International and Afghan officials agree the insurgency — which has killed 3,700 people this year, most of them rebels but including scores of civilians — will only abate if radical groups in Pakistan are curbed.
More than 20 Taliban fighters were killed in five days of fighting in eastern Afghanistan, including eight foreign fighters whose bodies were returned to Pakistan, an official said Sunday.
Gen. Murad Ali, the deputy Afghan army commander for Paktika province, said 20 bodies were recovered from the fighting in Bermel district. In addition, he said, airstrikes or artillery fire struck two Taliban trucks, killing an estimated 40 fighters. Four NATO soldiers and three Afghan soldiers were injured, he said.
Ali said tribal elders took the bodies of eight foreign fighters back to Pakistan for burial. A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said he had no independent estimate of the number of fighters killed, but did not dispute Ali’s figures.
“We are not into the numbers game here lately,” said the spokesman, Maj. Luke Knittig. Death tolls in remote areas of Afghanistan are almost impossible to verify and often vary widely.—Agencies