SARTAK, Afghanistan, 16 April 2006 — Afghan security forces backed by US-led coalition helicopters attacked a suspected Taleban hide-out in southern Afghanistan, sparking an intense gunbattle that left 41 rebels and six policemen dead, a senior Afghan official said yesterday.

Residents said they had appealed in vain for between 50 and 60 militants to leave their village days before Friday’s fighting erupted in Kandahar province, a former Taleban stronghold.

“Our elders had requested them (Taleban) to go away because we knew that one day American helicopters will come and drop bombs,” Faizullah, 55, told The Associated Press in Sartak, a village about 40 km southwest of Kandahar, where the heaviest fighting took place.

Provincial Gov. Asadullah Khalid said 41 militants were killed and several wounded, while six policemen died and nine were wounded. “We saw the 41 bodies of Taleban at the end of the fighting, but we collected only 11,” he said, refusing to elaborate on why the other bodies were not retrieved.

Khalid said security forces launched the assault following intelligence that the militants were preparing to attack Kandahar.

While the firing had died down yesterday and the situation was now under control, security forces were still searching for some Taleban who had fled, he said.

US military spokesman Lt. Mike Cody said coalition forces provided AH-64 Apache helicopters, which fired rockets in support of Afghan forces on the ground in the fighting, but declined comment on casualty figures, saying it was primarily an Afghan operation.

Faizullah said he saw only two militants and four Afghan policemen killed in Sartak, a village surrounded by blooming opium poppy fields, but added other Taleban may have been killed in other villages in the area.

Faizullah said Afghan police surrounded Sartak on Friday morning and asked villagers to evacuate, but some were still inside their homes when the fighting broke out. He said his 19-year-old sister Pari Bibi was killed in a gunbattle between Afghan forces and militants and two other villagers, including a 10-year-old girl, were wounded. It was unclear whose firing was responsible for the civilian deaths.

On Saturday, villagers were returning to their homes and local children were gathering shrapnel left over from the fighting. Three houses were badly damaged, and one local farmer, Mohammad Naseem, 40, moaned that his poppy crop was ruined, with a 5-meter-wide crater in the field.

No security forces were in the area yesterday, despite official claims that the hunt for Taleban fighters was continuing.