Taliban capture a remote district
An international soldier and nearly two-dozen insurgents were killed in new attacks in Afghanistan while Taliban militants captured a remote district, authorities said yesterday.
The soldier, who was with the US-led coalition helping Afghanistan to fight the insurgency, died Monday after being wounded in bomb explosion in the southern province of Helmand at the weekend, the force said in a statement.
The death took to 138 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, mostly in hostile action. Nearly 220 foreign soldiers died in violence last year.
About 20 Taliban rebels were also killed overnight after international helicopters attacked them in the eastern province of Khost, local government spokesman Khaibar Pashtun told AFP.
The choppers were called in after the rebels ambushed a police convoy, killing a policeman, Pashtun said.
Elsewhere in Khost an Afghan driver was killed after militants attacked a convoy supplying a foreign military base there, a police official said.
Meanwhile a provincial official says an insurgent attack on a fuel truck has killed six civilians in eastern Afghanistan.
The official, Abdul Wakil Atak, says the truck was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by insurgents in Laghman province on Sunday. Atak is a spokesman for the provincial governor.
Atak said Monday that two people were killed inside the truck and that four others died in a minibus that was caught in the blast.
The Nato-led military force in Afghanistan announced late Sunday that one of its troopers had been killed in the same province.
Dozens of Taliban militants meanwhile captured a remote district in central Ghazni province overnight, killing one policeman and injuring two others, a government spokesman said.
Local security forces had fled the centre of Ajiristan district, about 200km southwest of Kabul, the interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
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