3 Nato soldiers, 28 rebels killed in Afghanistan

Three US-led Nato soldiers and an Afghan working with them were killed in a bomb blast in Afghanistan yesterday as government officials said that 28 rebels, some of them foreigners, died in air strikes.
The fresh bloodshed comes as US President George W. Bush was set to announce extra troops for Afghanistan's fight against a rising tide of extremism and the Afghan and Pakistan leaders pledged to stand together against terrorism.
The soldiers were killed in the east of Afghanistan by an improvised explosive device (IED) of the type regularly used by Taliban and other extremist insurgents.
The US-led coalition did not give the nationalities of the troops but most international soldiers in the east are US nationals.
"Three coalition service members and one local-national contractor were killed today during an IED attack in eastern Afghanistan," it said in a statement that gave no further details.
The new deaths take to 201 the number of international soldiers to die in Afghanistan this year, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.
An Afghan soldier was killed separately by a remote-controlled bomb that had been fixed to a bicycle in the southern city of Kandahar, the defence ministry said.
"One military policeman in the vehicle was martyred and two others were wounded," spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.
In the southern province of Uruzgan meanwhile, troops were tipped off about a Taliban gathering on the outskirts of the town of Tirin Kot and sent in a strike early Tuesday, provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat said.
"The coalition forces bombed them and killed 16 Taliban and wounded another nine," Himat said.
And late Monday aircraft bombed a group of Taliban militants who had attacked a district centre in eastern Paktia province, a spokesman for the provincial government told AFP.
"Twelve Taliban were killed in the Nato air strike. Nine of them are Chechens and three are Afghans and Pakistanis," he said.
A Taliban-led insurgency has been on the rise since the hardliners' late 2001 ouster in a US-led invasion with most incidents in the south and east, claiming several thousand lives.
US and other generals leading the battle against insurgents say there are an increasing number of foreign Islamists, including Arabs and Central Asians, involved in the fighting.
Clashes are meanwhile claiming the lives of more and more civilians, with those killed in action by international troops of concern to the government, which needs public goodwill in its battle against the Islamists.
Two more civilians were killed Tuesday when a malfunction sent a weapon off target, Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said.
Militant attacks have increased year-on-year since a US-led invasion weeks after the September 2001 attacks on the United States removed Afghanistan's Taliban regime for sheltering al-Qaeda.
Deteriorating security has alarmed the country and its allies.