Thursday, June 11, 2009 KABUL: A NATO soldier is among 57 people -- most of them militants -- killed in new attacks, air strikes and clashes in an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan, authorities said Wednesday. Afghan and international security forces, who have stepped up operations ahead of August 20 elections, meanwhile destroyed Taliban heroin labs that bankroll the insurgents, the NATO-led force announced. The International Security Assistance Force soldier was killed in a "hostile incident" in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, the 40-nation ISAF said in a statement that did not give the nationality of the trooper. The US military said meanwhile it had killed a Taliban commander with reported links to Iran's Revolutionary Guards and up to 16 militants with him in a precision air strike in the west on Tuesday. The strike was called in against Mullah Mustafa, who commanded about 100 men, as he travelled in the western province of Ghor, it said in a statement. "Determining no civilians would be endangered, forces used precision aerial munitions to strike the group, killing Mustafa and as many as 16 other associated militants," it said.Afghan officials however said they had reports that civilians, including children, were killed. They also could not confirm the targeted commander was among the dead. The US statement said the commander "had recently met with senior Taliban leaders, and reportedly had connections to Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- Quds Force."Western officials have said Tehran may be involved in the conflict in Afghanistan, where thousands of US troops are based, perhaps by supplying weapons to the Taliban or allowing them to transit through Iran. An Afghan police chief announced meanwhile that security forces had killed 30 Taliban militants over the past three days in an operation to clear extremists from the troubled southern province of Uruzgan ahead of the polls.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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