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.
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