6 US soldiers killed in Afghan battle

Six US troops and three Afghan soldiers died when insurgents ambushed their foot patrol in eastern Afghanistan, one of the deadliest attacks on American forces this year, officials said yesterday.
The troops were returning from a meeting with village elders Friday afternoon in Nuristan province when militants attacked them with rocket propelled grenades and gunfire, said Lt Col David Accetta.
"They were attacked from several enemy positions at the same time," said Accetta, a spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force and the US military. "It was a complex ambush."
Eight more Americans and 11 Afghans were wounded. The 14 total US casualties was the highest number of wounded and killed from a battle in Afghanistan this year, Accetta said.
Mohammad Daoud Nadim, Nuristan deputy police chief, said the ambush happened in the remote province's Waygal district. He said military aircraft fired on enemy positions but had no information on any casualties among the militants.
It came days after Afghanistan's worst suicide bombing which killed nearly 80 people, also in the north, which has seen relatively little of the scale of violence that has rocked the insurgency-hit south and east.
Separately a suicide attacker aiming for German soldiers killed an elderly Afghan man, a provincial governor said.
The deaths took the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year to 200, according to an AFP count based on official statements.
Two Afghan troops were killed alongside their international colleagues when a patrol was ambushed in the mountainous Nuristan province, and the military responded with heavy fire, the Afghan defence ministry said.
The ministry said four of its men were hurt, while Isaf said eight of its soldiers were wounded.
"One of our units, along with Isaf troops, were on the move in an area in Nuristan," Afghan defence ministry spokesman Zahir Murad told AFP.
"They came under attack from Taliban following which fierce fighting broke out," he said. "The enemy has also suffered big casualties but we don't have a figure."
Isaf said the troops had been on a foot patrol when they were attacked from several positions by insurgents with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
"The combined force repelled the insurgent attack with small-arms, machine guns, mortars, artillery and close-air support," it said.
The remains of one attacker were discovered afterwards.
The incident comes with Afghanistan still grappling with Tuesday's suicide attack outside the normally peaceful northern town of Pul-i-Khumri.
It killed nearly 80 people: the country's previous most deadly killed 35 in Kabul in June.
They included six deputies from the country's first democratically elected parliament, one of them a key opposition figure.
Also among the dead were 59 school pupils who had gathered to welcome the lawmakers to a sugar factory, and five teachers and five bodyguards, according to various officials.
The Taliban, which has threatened to push its insurgency into the north, has denied involvement.
In another attack in the north, a suicide bomber blew himself up Saturday just outside the northern town of Kunduz. "He was trying to get close to a Nato German convoy," Kunduz governor Mohammad Omar said.
"Our intelligence officers were chasing him. When he realised he was being chased, he exploded himself. Two people were wounded. An old man died in the hospital," he said.
A spokesman for the extremist Taliban movement told AFP in a telephone call that his group was responsible.
In another attack in the north in the past week, a Norwegian soldier in the Isaf force was killed in a bomb blast in Faryab province on Thursday.