Fighting escalates in Afghanistan

Afghan security forces surrounded Taliban fighters hiding in a village in southern Afghanistan yesterday, launching a gunbattle that killed at least three militants and a police officer.

Elsewhere in the region, Taliban militants attacked an Afghan construction company working for coalition forces, killing a security guard.

The fighting came as visiting British Defence Secretary John Reid said coalition troops must maintain their offensive against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants to prevent their return to power.

"The greatest danger of all for the people of Afghanistan and the people of the United Kingdom would be if Afghanistan ever again came under the rule of a Taliban regime prepared to protect al-Qaeda or terrorist groups," Reid told reporters in the capital, Kabul.

Afghan police and soldiers fought Taliban militants in the volatile Gelan district of southern Ghazni province about 75 miles southwest of Kabul, said provincial Gov. Haji Sher Alam. Three Taliban fighters and a policeman were killed, he told The Associated Press.

The attack on the construction company occurred on the Uruzgan-Kandahar highway near a southern Kandahar village where four Canadian soldiers were killed in a suspected Taliban roadside bombing a day earlier.