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NATO war planes bombed a Taliban hideout in a volatile part of southern Afghanistan in an operation with Afghan forces that killed 30 rebel fighters, police said.
Afghan and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers raided the hideout in the Kajaki area of Helmand province on Tuesday, Helmand police chief Mohammad Nabi Mullahkhail said.
The British military force that serves with ISAF in Helmand confirmed it had been involved but could not say how many people were killed.
“The troops located a Taliban hideout and the NATO aerial support bombed the hideout and as a result of which 30 Taliban were killed and 10 to 15 others were wounded,” Mullahkhail said.
Among the dead was a local-level Taliban commander called Shir Agha, he said.
“After the bombing ground forces went to the area. There were some dead bodies but the wounded and some of the bodies were taken by the Taliban who survived the bombing,” he said.
A spokesman for British forces said from the Helmand capital Lashkar Gah he could not immediately confirm the kind of air power used in the strike.
“There was sporadic firing, sporadic engagements, as troops sought to clear some known Taliban compounds,” he said.
Helmand last year saw several fierce battles between soldiers and fighters loyal to the extremist Taliban movement that was ousted from government in late 2001.
The Kajaki area is especially important as it is home to the rundown Kajaki Dam, which is being rehabilitated so that it can provide power to a projected more than one million people. Only about 10 percent of Afghans have access to electricity.
“We want to set the security conditions to allow the project to go ahead,” the British spokesman said.
A British marine was killed mid-January in a mission to clear Taliban positions and firing points in the same area.
In another incident linked to the Taliban insurgency, a suicide attacker blew himself up Wednesday close to an ISAF vehicle in the eastern town of Torkham on the border with Pakistan, a border police commander told AFP.
“Only an interpreter for the troops was wounded in the suicide attack. Luckily there are no other casualties among the foreign forces or civilians,” Sayed Abdul Qahar said.
Qahar blamed the “enemies of peace in Afghanistan” for the attack. The term is often used by Afghan officials to refer to Taliban.
And in the province of Logar, near the capital Kabul, insurgents burned down a primary school in the latest in the rash of incidents targeting the country's struggling education system.
“The ministry condemns this unforgivable action of foreign mercenaries,” the Afghan interior ministry, which controls the police, said in a statement that did not refer to any particular country or group.
Similar attacks in the past have always been blamed on the remnants of the Taliban regime. The Afghan government says the militants are supported by circles in neighbouring Pakistan.
The fundamentalist Taliban have waged a bloody insurgency since they were toppled from power in a US-led offensive. The violence claimed more than 4,000 lives in 2006, the worst year since the invasion.
The unrest has hobbled Afghanistan's internationally-backed efforts to rebuild after 25 years of war.
International donors on Wednesday ended a high-level conference in Berlin on reconstruction after agreeing new initiatives proposed by Afghanistan including “accelerated Afghanisation of the national army and police, as well as in the area of economic development.”
The promise to increase Afghan “ownership” appeared to be a concession to pleas from the country to be allowed to play a greater role in spending billions of dollars of aid money.
