KABUL, 27 May 2004 — US-led forces backed by aircraft scattered suspected militants with precision-guided bombs during a sustained battle in southern Afghanistan, where Taleban and Al-Qaeda activity has been growing.
Afghan officials said 28 Taleban were killed in the Tuesday night air strikes, but a spokesman for the government in the southern city of Kandahar said yesterday eight militants had died and three Afghan soldiers were wounded.
Even so, the losses would be among the worst suffered by the militia in a single battle in 12 months. Taleban spokesman Haji Latif Hakimi said six Taleban and 20 government soldiers died.
Syed Fazal Din Agha, a senior government official in Spin Boldak, not far from the fighting, told reporters a senior Taleban commander called Qari Ahmedullah was among the dead.
Yesterday morning a US military spokesman confirmed heavy bombing in the area on Tuesday after a patrol came under fire, but could not give militant casualty figures.
“Ground forces first called in air support for a show of force, but when the enemy continued to engage they upgraded their request to precision ordnance,” Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager told a regular news briefing in Kabul yesterday.
The spokesman said the US-led patrol did not suffer any casualties in the attack.
The clashes took place between Qalat, capital of the province of Zabul, and Spin Boldak, a town in Kandahar province on the Pakistani border. The provinces were strongholds of the Taleban when it was in power, and their fighters are still active in both.
Mansager said militant resistance to 20,000 US-led troops in the south and east of the country hunting Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters was on the rise.
“We have seen in the last four to six weeks an increase in general anti-coalition militia activity,” he said.
US officials have said they believe Bin Laden, his Al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and Taleban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar are hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.
But Mansager said the US military did not believe the attacks were coordinated from a single source. “We don’t see a higher authority directing or manipulating all these things. Overall these are individual attacks or efforts, not coordinated overall by one higher authority.”
An upsurge of militant activity is a worrying trend for the US-backed government ahead of landmark elections due to be held in September. Already more than 700 people have died in violence since August, most in attacks blamed on militants bent on disrupting the polls.
In a separate incident, a patrol from US-led forces was attacked on Monday near Deh Rawud in the central Uruzgan province. Three suspected militants were detained, one of whom was carrying an assault rifle and rocket propelled grenades.
