KABUL, 8 August 2003 — Six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a US aid agency were killed yesterday in a raid by suspected Taleban guerrillas, while the group said it killed five government soldiers in a separate attack.
The death toll would be the biggest for a single day attributed to a resurgent Taleban guerrilla movement in many months, although local government officials denied the later incident had been an attack and gave no casualty figure for it.
The attack that killed the aid worker from Mercy Corps came just before dawn on a remote district headquarters in Deshu in the troubled southern province of Helmand not far from the Pakistani border, the deputy provincial police chief said.
“Six army soldiers and a driver for Mercy Corps lost their lives in the incident, which happened after morning prayers,” Mohammad Ayoub told Reuters. He said the soldiers were killed in a gunbattle resisting the raid. He did not know if any of the attackers, whom he described as Taleban guerrillas, had been killed.
Rod Volway, head of the Mercy Corps office in the neighboring province of Kandahar, confirmed that a driver for the agency, Raz Mohammad, had been killed.
He said three Afghan employees of the agency had been in Deshu conducting an assessment for an agricultural project. The two others were safe and Mercy Corps was withdrawing them and two other teams from the area.
In another incident, in Kandahar province, Taleban guerrillas said they had killed five Afghan government soldiers and wounded three in a rocket attack on their vehicle some 25 km north of the town of Spin Boldak. “Their vehicle was totally destroyed and the Taleban left the area after the attack,” Mullah Abdul Samad, an intelligence officer in the regime overthrown in 2001, told Reuters by satellite phone.
Lal Mohammad, a farmer in the area, said he saw the vehicle in flames after the attack in the Mail Pul area and reported hearing explosions from rocket fire.
