Thirty-four insurgents reported killed in Afghanistan

Clashes and bombings left up to 34 Taliban fighters and one policeman dead in five separate incidents in central and southern Afghanistan, officials said today.

Police recovered the bodies of seven suspected Taliban fighters after a two-hour clash with police early today in a mountainous southern region of Helmand province, district police chief Ghulam Rasool said.

Nato-led soldiers, meanwhile, killed up to 10 suspected insurgents in Helmand’s Garmser district yesterday in a clash that also destroyed three insurgent vehicles, a Nato statement said.

There were no Nato casualties.

Afghanistan has been suffering its heaviest insurgent attacks since the Taliban regime was toppled in late 2001. On Monday, three bombings killed at least 19 people, including four Canadian soldiers.

Suspected Taliban fighters ambushed police in Ghazni province yesterday, and provincial police chief Tafseer Khan claimed that 13 fighters were killed. But he said no bodies had been recovered because the insurgents removed them from the battlefield.

Khan also said that two police and about 17 fighters were wounded in the fight in Giro district.

Four insurgents were killed in a clash with Afghan soldiers in eastern Paktika province yesterday, a Defence Ministry statement said. The troops recovered an unspecified amount of ammunition and a mortar.

In the central province of Wardak, one policeman was killed and two wounded after dozens of fighters attacked police, said Mohammed Hassan, the deputy provincial police chief. One of the officer’s legs was severed by a rocket-propelled grenade.

A roadside bomb wounded three Afghan soldiers in neighbouring Khost province, the ministry said.

An American civilian contractor and an Afghan interpreter, meanwhile, surfaced unharmed at the main Nato base in southern Afghanistan yesterday, two days after being ambushed by gunmen in southwestern Nimroz province, said Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, a US military spokesman.

Fearing that the pair had been kidnapped, American troops had launched a two-day search and rescue mission in the area, Fitzpatrick said. But the two appeared at Kandahar Air Field on their own.

The two work for US-based L-3 Communications Titan Group, which provides interpreters for the US military in Afghanistan. No one from the company was immediately available for comment.