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| British soldier among 31 killed in Afghan violence |
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Saturday, July 18, 2009
KABUL: Seventeen Taliban and two tribal chiefs were killed in Afghanistan on Friday, while 12 people, including five children, died in bomb blasts separately, authorities and locals said. Britain, meanwhile, said one of its soldiers died. The Taliban and the tribal chiefs were killed in two separate rebel attacks, local officials said.
In the southeastern province of Paktika, insurgents attacked a coalition forces compound just after midnight, Rohullah Samoon, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said.“The Taliban were forced to flee and then they were bombed by international forces planes. Fourteen rebels were killed and their bodies found left on the ground,” he said.
In the district of Spinghar in the eastern province of Nangarhar, three Taliban and two tribal chiefs died in fighting that broke out when rebels attacked a tribal council, district chief Said Muhammad Pahlawan said. He added that 11 militants were captured. Meanwhile, bombs killed a dozen people, including a British soldier and five children, in southern Afghanistan, authorities said on Friday, as US and British officials consider sending more troops to combat the growing Taliban insurgency.
The five children were among 11 people who died on Friday when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in the Spin Boldak district of the Kandahar province, according to police Gen Saifullah Hakim. The victims, all members of an extended family, were travelling to a religious shrine, Hakim said. “Three women, three men and five children were killed,” he said. “All of them were civilians. They were going to a shrine when their vehicle was hit by a newly-planted bomb,” he added.
The police said three women were wounded, who were shifted to a hospital. General Abdul Raziq, border police chief for Zabul and Kandahar provinces, said: “Three (of the dead) children were between one and two years old. The other two were aged around five.” Raziq speculated that the border police might have been the intended target of Friday’s blast, because there was a border police post on the same road.
In London, the British Ministry of Defence announced that a British soldier was killed on Thursday when a bomb exploded near a foot patrol in Gereshk city of the Helmand province. Meanwhile, the chief of the British army, Gen Richard Dannatt, said there was a case to be made for “a short-term uplift” in troop numbers until Afghan forces were properly trained and deployed — which he said could take another 12 to 18 months. He told the BBC Radio that scaling down troop levels after the Afghan election would be the “wrong thing to do.”
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