At least 25 Taliban reported killed in Afghanistan
KABUL (AFP) — Afghan and international security forces killed 25 Taliban in an area of southern Afghanistan that has witnessed days of deadly clashes, officials said Sunday.
The 25 were killed Saturday in an operation by Afghan police and soldiers from the US-led coalition in the troubled province of Uruzgan, the interior ministry said in a statement.
"The bodies of the dead were left at the battlefield," it said, adding that a Taliban commander was seriously hurt.
The operation was in a district next to some of the most volatile parts of southern Afghanistan, a focus of a bloody Taliban-led campaign launched soon after the extremists were removed from government six years ago.
The coalition announced separately that its troops, teamed up with Afghan security forces, had repelled an attack Friday on a military base in Uruzgan province.
"There were some casualties to the enemy," a coalition spokesman told AFP without providing details.
Two foreign soldiers, one of them a 21-year-old Dutch national, were killed in Uruzgan in incidents on Friday and Saturday.
The Netherlands has around 1,650 soldiers in Uruzgan, while there are also several hundred Australian troops in the province.
The coalition also announced it had killed several insurgents Saturday in the southern province of Helmand -- an area where several British troops have taken the lead in NATO-led operations.
Warplanes were called in after rebels tried to ambush soldiers around Musa Qala district, the centre of which has been in Taliban control for months and is considered a rebel base.
The Taliban overran two districts in neighbouring Farah province in the past week: officials have said they are preparing operations to take them back.
The Taliban insurgency has grown steadily in the past years, with daily attacks over summer which are expected to drop off as winter approaches. More than 5,000 have been killed this year, most of them rebels.
In other violence blamed on the Taliban, a bomb exploded near the border with Pakistan early Sunday, killing a school headmaster who was returning from prayers, police said.
