MIANA SHIEN, Afghanistan, 26 June 2005 — Afghan forces scouring mountains in the country’s south have found the bodies of another 76 suspected rebels, bringing to 178 the insurgent death toll in some of the deadliest fighting since the fall of the Taleban in 2001, the Defense Ministry said yesterday.
“Our forces have collected the bodies of 76 more rebels from the battlefield,” ministry spokesman Zahir Marad said, adding that the corpses had been scattered across a wide mountainous area in and around the Miana Shien district of Kandahar province.
Fifty-six suspected insurgents have also been captured since Tuesday in a blistering barrage by Afghan and US forces against rebel camps, Marad said. The US military’s toll of insurgents killed was much lower, 56, but American spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara said this did not make the government’s figure necessarily wrong because Afghan forces had taken the lead in the operation and US-led coalition troops were finding it hard to keep a tally of the dead.
O’Hara said there had been no major fighting in the region since Thursday. But Gen. Salim Khan, a police commander on the battlefield, said his forces have kept up their pursuit of rebels fleeing on horseback and motorcycle.
Government and US military leaders, meanwhile, met in Miana Shien yesterday with about 35 tribal chiefs to seek their help in the battle against the Taleban. Dozens of Afghan and American troops guarded the meeting.
