In one incident, a group of Taliban fighters attacked a town in the southern province of Kandahar late Friday, sparking a battle that killed 12 of the rebels and five policemen, the provincial police chief said.

Another three policemen were wounded in the attack on the district headquarters in the small town of Ghorak, police chief Ismatullah Alizai said.

Elsewhere in Kandahar -- the 1990s birthplace of the hardcore Taliban movement -- rebel fighters ambushed a police vehicle and attacked it with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire early Saturday, Alizai said.

"Five police were killed and four more wounded," he said.

A spokesman for the Taliban confirmed that his group was behind both attacks. The hardliners were in government until 2001 and are now waging an insurgency.

In the province of Laghman, adjacent to Kabul, a remote-controlled bomb killed a policeman on patrol late Friday, a governor's spokesman said.

Three others were hurt in the blast in the volatile Alishing district, about 80km northeast of the capital, said the spokesman, named only as Nizamuddin.

The Afghan army arrested separately Thursday a man they said was a Taliban commander who had planned attacks and explosions in the same district, Nizamuddin said.

The US-led coalition announced that several al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were killed in a gun battle early Saturday in the southern province of Zabul.

Afghan and foreign soldiers had gone to two compounds on intelligence that they housed fighters of the allied Islamist movements, it said in a statement.

As they approached, they were shot at with small arms, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades from a hillside.

A two-hour battle followed and resulted in "several al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters killed and five militants detained," it said.

A cache of weapons was discovered and destroyed. No civilians were injured in the operation, the counter-terrorism force said.