Two Nato soldiers among 9 killed in Afghanistan
Two soldiers in the Nato-led force helping the Afghan government fight an insurgency were killed Tuesday, while five Taliban militants and two policemen died elsewhere, security officials said.
Nato's International Security Assistance Force did not say how its soldiers died nor did it give their nationalities.
"Two Isaf servicemen were killed today in southern Afghanistan," it said in a statement.
Southern Afghanistan is a notorious hotspot for the Taliban-led insurgency, with several districts out of government control.
There more than 22,000 foreign soldiers in the south, most of them American, British, Canadian and Dutch.
The latest deaths take to 21 the number of international soldiers to die in Afghanistan this year, according to the icasualties.org website that tracks the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Afghan authorities reported that local and international troops killed five Taliban in an operation in the southern province of Helmand on Monday.
"Five Taliban were killed and the bodies were left at the site," said provincial police chief Assadullah Shirzad.
In the eastern province of Kunar, a bomb struck a police vehicle killing two policemen and wounding four late Monday, border police commander Mohammad Zaman Mamozai said.
Taliban and other insurgents regularly bomb security forces and the number of such attacks doubled last year to roughly 2,000, according to US officials.
Up to 30,000 extra US troops are expected to start deploying into Afghanistan over the coming year, most of them in the south, as Washington shifts the main focus in the US-led "war on terror" from Iraq.
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