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Taliban militants killled by foreign airstrikes in Afghanistan

Overnight airstrikes by foreign forces killed about 70 Taliban fighters southern Afghan province, the provincial governor's spokesman said on Wednesday

  • Agencies
  • Published: 11:46 October 15, 2008
  • Gulf News

Kabul: Overnight airstrikes by foreign forces killed about 70 Taliban fighters southern Afghan province, the provincial governor's spokesman said on Wednesday.

The strike took place late on Tuesday in the Helmand provinces Baram Cha district.

"Most of these Taliban (killed) are foreign fighters who entered Afghanistan to destabilise the country," the Helmand governor's spokesman Dawood Ahmadi told Reuters in Kandahar.

Earlier officials said Taliban militants attacked police checkpoints ringing a key provincial capital in southern Afghanistan for the second time in a week, sparking a battle in which 18 insurgents were killed, an official said on Wednesday.

The attack on late Tuesday came only two days after hundreds of militants gathered on the horizons of Lashkar Gah for an apparent large-scale assault on the capital of Helmand province. Nato called in fighter aircraft and 60 militants were reported killed.

The second attempt on the capital of the world's largest opium producing region would appear to signal the Taliban's interest in disrupting a major government centre.

Tuesday's battle killed 18 militants and wounded three police, said provincial police chief Assadullah Sherzad.

Sherzad said authorities recovered only one militant body and that the others were carried away by fighters. Afghan officials say they rely on intelligence reports to form militant death tolls, but government officials have been known to exaggerate such tolls in past battles.

In a separate incident, six policemen died after a shootout among officers inside a police checkpoint about 20 kilometres north of Lashkar Gah, said Daud Ahmadi, the spokesman for the provincial governor.

"We are investigating how and why this incident happened," Ahmadi said. He provided no other details.

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