Dozens of Taliban killed in central Afghanistan clashes

KANDAHAR (Afghanistan)—Afghan and foreign troops battled militants who ambushed their patrol in central Afghanistan on Thursday, leaving nine Taliban fighters dead, a government official said.
The clash occurred in the Gilan district of Ghazni province, said district chief Abdul Wali Thofan. There were no casualties among the troops, he said. He did not specify where the foreign forces came from, but most of the troops in Ghazni are American.
Authorities recovered the militants’ bodies along with their weapons and six motorbikes, Thofan said. Separately, a roadside bomb struck a Canadian military vehicle in southern Afghanistan, the heart of the Taliban-led insurgency. No one died in the blast on Thursday near Spin Boldak, a town on the Pakistani border, said Lt. Cmdr Pierre Babinsky, a spokesman for NATO troops in the south.
He declined to say whether any soldiers were wounded. The insurgency has left more than 1,000 people dead so far this year, most of them militants, according to an Associated Press tally of figures provided by Afghan and Western officials.
The two latest incidents came a day after U.S.-led coalition troops detained 12 suspected militants in two separate operations. Troops detained seven suspected militants believed linked to foreign fighters and involved in bomb-making in the eastern province of Khost, a coalition statement said Thursday. Another five were detained in southwestern Nimroz province, the statement said. Troops recovered weapons, ammunition and bomb-making material during the raids.
Afghan and foreign forces killed several dozen Taliban insurgents on Thursday in separate clashes in Afghanistan, officials said. After the traditional winter lull, violence has increased in recent weeks in Afghanistan.
Twenty Taliban fighters were killed in a joint operation by Afghan and NATO forces in the southern province of Zabul, a senior provincial police official, Faridullah Khogiani, said.
In neighboring Ghazni province, 10 insurgents died after a botched ambush against a joint Afghan and U.S.-led convoy on a highway in Ghazni province, a provincial official said. In another clash in the same province, the Afghan National Army killed three more Taliban guerrillas, the defense ministry said in a statement.
There were no casualties among Afghan and foreign forces in any of the encounters, Afghan officials said. The Taliban could not be contacted immediately for comment.
Also on Thursday, at least two NATO soldiers were wounded and a tank destroyed when a remote-controlled roadside bomb exploded in Kandahar’s Spin Boldak town on the Pakistani border, border police chief, Abdul Raziq Khan, told Reuters.
He did not give the nationalities of the wounded soldiers but most of the foreign soldiers in Kandahar are Canadian. A Taliban spokesman told Reuters that the militant group was behind the blast.
Removed from power in 2001, the Taliban Islamic movement leads an insurgency against the Afghan government and foreign troops. The al Qaeda-backed militant group has vowed to topple the government and drive out foreign troops under the command of the U.S. military and NATO.
Violence has killed more than 11,000 people in the past two years, the bloodiest period since Taliban’s ouster. It happens despite the presence of more than 55,000 foreign troops and some 140,000 national forces.—Agencies