KABUL, 24 March 2005 — US-led troops killed a boy in eastern Afghanistan yesterday while searching a village for a militant who had been making bombs, the US military said in a statement. It said the boy, aged between 10 and 14, died in a village near Asadabad.

“Coalition troops were looking for a suspected maker of improvised explosive devices in Kunar province when the incident occurred,” the statement said. When troops approached the suspect’s house, he and two armed men fled shouting in an apparent attempt to rally others in the village.

When it appeared that the suspected insurgents were taking up firing positions, the statement said, troops opened fire and killed the boy, whom village elders described as a transient.

US forces, however, killed five militants in southeastern Afghanistan after coming under rocket and small arms fire, the US military said. The militants had attacked a base in Khost province and checkpoints on the nearby border with Pakistan on Tuesday night. “Coalition troops returned fire with 155mm artillery rounds at enemy positions. Coalition aircraft killed five insurgents,” the US military said.

The US military did not say who the attackers were but a Taleban spokesman said Taleban fighters had fired 20 rockets at US positions near Khost airport. Ten Afghan government soldiers were killed and 15 wounded in the attack, the Taleban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi told the Afghan Islamic Press news agency, but the US said there had been no casualties on the coalition’s side.

Separately, suspected Taleban members killed two Afghan security officials and wounded another in an ambush in Girishk district of southern Helmand province yesterday, a local official said.

Seven policemen and soldiers were wounded in the same district earlier in the day in what was described as a “mistaken clash” between police and army forces, the official added. Meanwhile, several rockets struck the outskirts of Kandahar city, causing little damage and no casualties.

In another development, NATO peacekeepers in Afghanistan will be shortly deployed in the country’s relatively stable west and hopefully to the more troublesome south soon after, the alliance’s top general said yesterday. Gen. James Jones of the US Marines, accompanying a party of NATO parliamentarians to Kabul, described the security situation in Afghanistan as stable “with incidence of fragility”.

“I don’t think were facing anything that remotely resembles an organized insurgency,” Jones said, noting how the threat from Al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters had faded in the past three years.

As Afghanistan prepares for the next step toward developing democracy with parliamentary elections due on Sept. 18, Jones said the country remained vulnerable to random acts of violence.

Most violence occurs in Afghanistan’s south, southeast and east where US-led troops are hunting remnants of the Taleban and some lingering foreign Al-Qaeda fighters. NATO forces have still to deploy in these regions, where the number of attacks, according to US generals, has fallen sharply since a presidential election last October.

On Tuesday night, US forces killed five militants after coming under fire in the southeast province of Khost. And a week ago a bomb killed five people in the southern city of Kandahar and wounded 32 others.

NATO peacekeepers, concentrated in capital Kabul and the north, were about to expand operations to the relatively stable west. “NATO is putting a lot of emphasis on mission expansion for Stage Two, and we expect that soon thereafter we could also look forward to going to stage three,” Jones said, referring to deployment in the west and then the more troublesome south.

There are currently close to 8,500 NATO-led peacekeepers in Afghanistan, while US-led forces number around 18,000.

Some 100 Italian troops took over from US troops involved in a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in the western province of Herat this month, and Spanish troops will take over a PRT role in Badghis province, while Lithuanian troops were going to Ghor. PRTs carry out small developmental projects aimed at forging trust with Afghan communities.