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12 Talibs toe tag near Kandahar
At least 12 Taliban fighters have been killed in the week-old offensive in Afghanistan, which the US officials hope will snare al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Twelve Taliban fighters were killed in an air strike on their truck in Kandahar province on Thursday, Afghan army officers said. They were the first reported casualties in Operation "Mountain Storm", which began on March 7 and involves troops from the 13,500-strong US-led force backed by air support. In a separate battle in the same area, about 60 Taliban fighters armed with rockets and heavy machine guns attacked a government office near the Pakistani border, police said on Sunday. The Taliban attacked the office of the Shorabak district chief, 180 kilometres southeast of Kandahar, on Saturday evening, sparking a gunbattle that left three attackers and one Afghan soldier dead and two soldiers wounded, Kandahar deputy police chief Gen Salim Khan said. The tracks of their vehicles showed they came from Pakistan, and retreated there after the fight, he said, adding that the Coalition forces were not involved in the gunbattle. Also two rockets hit the capital of eastern Laghman province, killing one civilian, the provinceâs governor said on Sunday. A rocket tore through the roof of the manâs home late on Saturday in Mehtarlam, Gov Mohammed Ibrahim Babkerkhel said. The second rocket landed in an open field near Babkerkhelâs home, shattering windows there and at several nearby houses. Qari Mahmood, claiming to be a spokesman for the Taliban, said: "We carried out this attack." Early on Sunday, unidentified attackers fired three rockets into Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Nangarhar province, said Yar Mohammed Khan, a Jalalabad security official. No injuries were reported, but the explosions shattered windows and toppled walls of two homes. Separately, Gen Abdul Raziq, a senior Afghan border security chief, said an operation near Atghar in Zabul province netted Mullah Baloch, the nephew of a front-line Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Razaq, as well as Mullah Salah Mohammed and Mullah Naimat. Raziq said US forces were also involved in the multi-day operation, which ended on Thursday, although US Lt-Col Hilferty said on Sunday he had no information about it. Many weapons were seized in the raid, General Fateh Khan, an Afghan army officer based in the southeast of the country, said. It was not clear how powerful the three captured men were. In Kabul, the house of a United Nations team working to register voters for Afghanistanâs upcoming elections was attacked by the Taliban on Sunday in southeastern province of Paktia but there were no casualties, a UN spokesman said. "We attacked a UN team on Sunday in Chamkani district," a man claiming to be a Taliban spokesman told AFP. "We donât know if there were any casualties, but several vehicles were destroyed," the man who calls himself Abdul Samad told AFP via telephone from southeastern Afghanistan. United Nations spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva confirmed the incident and said that no one had been hurt. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-03-15 |
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