KHOST, Afghanistan (AFP) — NATO and US troops killed dozens of militants on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, officials said Tuesday, after foreign forces suffered their deadliest month since the fall of the Taliban.
US-led helicopters and bombers killed 33 insurgents in eastern Khost province late Monday, while NATO soldiers in the same area cooperated with Pakistani troops across the frontier to kill several more rebels, they said.
But the violence came as the international troops passed a grim milestone, with the 49 soldiers who died in June making it their bloodiest month yet in Afghanistan and worse than Iraq for the second month in a row.
The Taliban, whom western and Afghan officials say have sanctuaries in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, have dramatically stepped up an insurgency they launched after being ousted from government in late 2001.
In Khost, the US-led coalition said it launched air strikes after spotting rebels armed with rockets and heavy weapons massing about eight kilometres (five miles) from the Pakistan border.
"After positively identifying the militants, coalition forces engaged with them using attack helicopters and close air support bombers, killing approximately 33 militants," spokesman Lieutenant Nathan Perry told AFP.
Separately, an outpost of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in troubled Khost came under attack late Monday from rebels using rockets and small-arms, an ISAF statement said.
ISAF, co-ordinating with the Pakistan military, responded with air strikes, artillery and rocket fire, causing the militants to flee into Pakistan, it said.
The statement said a number were killed but did not specify how many. An ISAF source however said that 11 rebels were believed to have died.
The joint operation comes despite growing tensions between Pakistan and western nations with troops in Afghanistan, and less than a month after US forces allegedly killed 11 Pakistani troops in an airstrike.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai last month threatened to launch military action on Pakistani soil to tackle the rebels, whom he blamed for a wave of violence including a mass rebel jailbreak in the southern city of Kandahar.
In other violence four police officers died on Tuesday when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb as they went to reinforce a checkpost that had come under attack in troubled southern Uruzgan province, police said.
The US-led force said it helped Afghan security forces kill "several" insurgents in the province Tuesday and a young girl was also killed in the fighting, the coalition said in a statement.
Gunmen dragged three pro-Karzai tribal elders from their car and shot them dead in Paktika province, which borders Khost, on Monday, officials said, while a policeman was killed in a separate but similar incident in the same area.
Five other Taliban militants died in a clash in southern Zabul province on Tuesday, the district chief said, while the coalition said another rebel was killed in southwestern Nimroz province.
The worsening violence, particularly on the Pakistani border, has made Afghanistan deadlier than ever for nearly 70,000 NATO and US-led coalition troops battling the Taliban.
An AFP tally based on military statements and the independent website icasualties.org. that the 49 foreign troop deaths in June accounted for more than 40 percent of the 122 killed in Afghanistan during 2008.
ISAF spokesman General Carlos Branco said the figures should be seen in the context of rising numbers of international forces fighting a resurgent Taliban who are going to places they were "not going before."
By contrast, 31 soldiers including 29 Americans were killed in Iraq in June despite there being more than twice as many troops there as in Afghanistan, casualties figures showed.
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