Afghan and international authorities said on Saturday that about 30 insurgents had been killed in new clashes in militant hotspots as a district police chief and his guard died in a bombing.
Nineteen rebels were killed in operations on Friday and earlier on Saturday in the northeastern province of Kunar, the US military said.
The operation was in the same area where militants stormed a military outpost early on Friday in an attack that the NATO-led force said killed three US and two Latvian soldiers dead as well as four Afghan troops and an interpreter.
The military did not make it clear if the clash with insurgents was linked to the attack on the base, which was the deadliest incident for foreign troops in about eight months.
An Afghan-led force was conducting a patrol in an “area of known militant presence” when they were attacked by armed insurgents, a US military statement said.
The troops returned fire and called for close-air support, killing 19 militants, it said.
An Afghan official had said earlier that troop reinforcements were deployed to the area to hunt down the men involved in the attack on the base.
“We have sent reinforcements to the area. We are searching for the attackers,” defense ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi said.
It was the highest toll for foreign soldiers in a single incident in Afghanistan since an Aug. 18 attack on French troops left 10 of them dead and 21 wounded.
In other incidents reported Saturday, the US military said its forces working with Afghan troops had killed five militants on Friday in the southern province of Helmand, a stronghold of the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban militia.
Six to seven more fighters were killed overnight in the adjoining province of Kandahar, provincial police intelligence chief Abdullah Khan said.
They had been traveling in a pick-up vehicle and were targeted by an air strike, he said.
The defense ministry said separately that its men had killed one “terrorist” on Friday in Paktika Province.
None of the incidents or tolls could be independently confirmed.
The interior ministry reported meanwhile that the police chief of Farsi district in Herat Province was killed, along with a bodyguard, early on Saturday when a bomb blew up their vehicle.
It blamed the attack, in which six policemen were also wounded, on insurgents.
Attacks and clashes linked to a Taliban-led insurgency have picked up in recent weeks and the militants warned days ago that they would launch a new operation against the Afghan forces and the international troops helping them.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS