KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) — Violence raged across southern Afghanistan at the weekend with more than 60 people -- mostly rebels -- killed, authorities said Sunday, as the country prepared to celebrate Independence Day.
In the capital Kabul, about 7,000 police launched a major security operation on Sunday, conducting stepped-up searches and patrols one day after the Afghan education minister escaped unharmed from a roadside bomb attack.
Authorities have already announced they would hold a more low-key commemoration of Independence Day on Monday, rather than the traditional high-profile event, amid the surge in violence.
In the deadliest weekend incident, Afghan security forces killed at least 28 Taliban-linked rebels who attacked a convoy that was delivering supplies to international troops, the defence ministry said.
The ministry said that 28 "enemy bodies" had remained on the ground after the fight 10 kilometres (six miles) from the town of Qalat in Zabul province.
Deputy provincial governor Gulab Shah Alikhail put the rebel death toll at 32 and said five private security guards were also killed in the four-hour battle. The interior ministry said nine guards had died.
Seven Taliban-linked militants were killed separately in Zabul, an official there said.
Also in the south, a roadside bomb hit a police jeep late Saturday and killed 10 officers, said the police chief of Kandahar province, Mutiullah Khan.
He blamed the bombing on the "enemies of Afghanistan" -- a phrase most Afghan officials use to refer to Taliban militants.
Roadside bombs are widely used by the Taliban and other militants in their attacks on Afghan and foreign troops.
Around 800 Afghan security forces have been killed in violence this year, according to interior ministry figures. Most have been police as they are a softer target than the Afghan army and international forces.
Kandahar province, from where the Taliban sprung in the 1990s, has seen much of the violence in Afghanistan since the hardliners launched their insurgency after being ousted from government in 2001.
In other fighting, a dozen rebels, most of them Al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters, were killed in an operation by Afghan and foreign troops in central Ghazni province late Saturday, said Ismail Jahangir, a provincial spokesman.
The defence ministry said an Afghan soldier was killed and six others were wounded in two bomb blasts on Saturday, one of them near Kabul.
In southern Helmand province, also a hotbed of rebel violence, authorities said they had captured a three-member militant "gang" responsible for killing influential tribal chiefs.
"It was a dangerous gang which was trained in Pakistan and was responsible for the killing of about 30 tribal chiefs in the past three or four years," provincial governor Gulab Mangal told AFP.
Also in Helmand, four civilians were "accidentally" killed on Saturday when NATO-led troops fired rockets at a compound where militants were believed to be preparing an attack, the alliance's force announced.
US-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001 after the September 11 attacks on the United States but they have regrouped to challenge the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
The rebels have some sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan, which is under pressure from US and Afghan officials to clamp down on the militants.
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