International troops and Afghan police seized 250 tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser – enough to make hundreds of roadside bombs, the Taliban’s most lethal weapon in what has been the deadliest year of the war.

MILITANT fighters streaming from an Afghan village and a mosque attacked a pair of remote outposts near the Pakistani border, killing eight US soldiers and as many as seven Afghan forces in one of the fiercest battles of the eight-year war.