WASHINGTON, 19 June 2006 — US airstrikes in Afghanistan have surged in the past three months as fighting has spread, The Washington Post reported yesterday.
Washington carried out 340 airstrikes in that time frame, “more than twice the 160 carried out in the much higher-profile war in Iraq,” the report said, citing the US military headquarters for the Middle East.
The report also said the airstrikes “appear to have increased in recent days as the United States and its allies have launched counteroffensives against the Taleban in the south and southeast, strafing and bombing a stronghold in Uruzgan province and pounding an area near Khost with 500-pound bombs.”
Many of the airstrikes have been conducted with aircraft ranging from B-52 bombers to small Predator drones, the Post added.
British troops said yesterday they had killed six rebels who had been firing mortars at one of Afghanistan’s few hydro-electric dams, while the Taleban gunned down a former district chief and four bodyguards.
British forces returned fire with mortars after they also came under fire late Saturday near the Kajaki dam and power plant in southern Helmand province, a British military spokesman said.
“Suspected Taleban have fired mortars against Kajaki power plant for the past couple of nights,” Capt. Drew Jabson told AFP.
A British force went to the area on Saturday. “When they fired mortars at us, British troops fired back. We were able to confirm six Taleban killed,” he said.
The plant is one of the few hydro-electricity systems that functions in Afghanistan. It is in Kajaki district near Musa Qala and Sangin, where the Taleban are active.
“By this, the Taleban have shown their desire to fight people, destroy their infrastructure,” Jabson said. Elsewhere in the province, a former district chief of Sangin was killed along with four guards in an attack on their vehicle yesterday, a provincial spokesman said.
Juma Gull, the brother of a legislator who was also the former provincial intelligence chief, was traveling from Sangin to neighboring Kandahar province when his vehicle was ambushed, spokesman Mohaidin Khan told AFP.
