Afghan official says 50 Taliban killed or wounded
Source: Reuters
(Recasts with Uruzgan strike, changes dateline) KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Foreign forces in Afghanistan killed or wounded 50 suspected Taliban militants in an air strike in southern Uruzgan province, an Afghan official said on Tuesday. The air raid was carried out in Tirin Kot district on Monday, the province's intelligence chief, Gulab said. The NATO-led force and the U.S. military said they had no information. "We got the intelligence about the insurgents gathering in a village, so we asked the NATO forces for help," said Gulab, who uses only one name. "As a result of the air strike 50 insurgents were killed or wounded," he said. Violence in Afghanistan this year has been the worst since the Taliban's ouster in 2001, forcing some Western politicians to warn that the battle-scarred nation may slide back into anarchy. Separately, some 23 Taliban insurgents died during operations by Afghan and Western forces in other areas of the south and east of the country on Monday, Afghan officials said. Elsewhere, U.S-led coalition troops said they had targeted the network of veteran Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani on Monday during an operation in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, and detained two suspected militants. It did not refer to another operation the same day in which Pakistani witnesses and intelligence officials said U.S. drones fired missiles at a house and religious school founded by Haqqani, just across the border in Pakistan, killing 23 people. Haqqani is considered close to fugitive al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. Several of the dead were Haqqani's relatives. The ailing Taliban commander was in Afghanistan along with his son Sirajuddin, who has been leading the group, at the time of the attack, another of Haqqani's sons said. In another development, NATO forces accidentally killed two civilians and wounded up to 10 others in an air strike in Khost on Tuesday, the alliance said. More than 2,700 people, including 1,100 civilians, have been killed by violence so far this year in Afghanistan, according to locals and aid agencies. While rising civilian deaths have caused a rift between Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government and its Western backers, foreign troop deaths in August also reached their highest monthly total since 2001. A roadside bomb killed three U.S.-led coalition soldiers and a local contractor in the east of the country on Tuesday, the U.S. military said. It did not specify where the incident happened or the nationality of the soldiers. Earlier on Tuesday, two rockets hit a residential area of central Kabul but there were no casualties, an interior ministry spokesman said. The Taliban, removed from power in the U.S.-led invasion for failing to hand over al Qaeda leaders, could not be reached for comment immediately about any of the reports. (Reporting by Afghanistan bureau; Editing by Sayed Salahuddin and Paul Tait)
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