Over 40 killed in Afghan violence

KABUL (Afghanistan)—Afghan and NATO forces killed more than 40 insurgents in an air and ground battle in southern Afghanistan, a security official said Sunday. Separately, two soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition died after hitting a roadside bomb.
Troops seized dozens of weapons — including rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns — after Saturday’s battle in Dihrawud, a district in Uruzgan province, the Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement. It said many militants were killed, including a commander, but provided no figures.
An official at the ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release details about the battle, put the number of dead at more than 40.
Also Saturday, U.S.-led coalition troops hit a roadside bomb in Kandahar province as they were conducting a security patrol with Afghan troops, the coalition said in a statement. Two soldiers died, it said, without releasing their nationalities.
In the northern province of Jawzjan, five Afghans working on a de-mining team were killed and eight others were wounded when their truck was attacked by militants, said Kefayat Ullah Ablagh, head of the U.N.-funded Afghan Technical Consultants.
Ablagh said it was the first time de-mining workers in his company had been attacked by militants since the country’s civil war ended in the mid 1990s.
Afghan and U.S.-led coalition troops killed more than a dozen Taliban insurgents, hitting back with air and ground forces after militants ambushed them in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. military statement said.
Concealed Taliban insurgents attacked the joint coalition and Afghan security forces patrol in the Deh Rawood district of the southern province of Uruzgan on Friday. The patrol immediately returned fire and advanced on the Taliban positions, the statement said.
“Once the enemy fighting positions were located, friendly forces called in close air support, eliminating the insurgents,” it said. The Afghan Defence Ministry earlier said Afghan and NATO-led forces had killed tens of Taliban insurgents in an operation in the same area on Saturday, but a U.S. coalition spokesman said it was the same incident and that it happened on Friday.
Elsewhere in the south, a mine killed two soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. “Coalition forces, along with Afghan National Security Forces, were conducting a security patrol in the Zharmi District, when their vehicle struck a mine placed on a frequently traveled road,” said the statement, issued late on Saturday.
Taliban insurgents planted hundreds of mines and roadside bombs in 2007, contributing to a record year of violence that killed more than 6,000 people, nearly 2,000 of them civilians.
More than 200 foreign troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2007 while nearly 30 troops from the U.S.-led coalition and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been killed since so far this year.
Afghan and NATO forces both say they need more troops to fight off a revived Taliban insurgency. The United States is pressing its NATO allies to come up with more troops and trainers for Afghan forces at a summit in early April. —Agencies