Agence France-Presse,
New Taliban attacks killed 14 Afghan policemen, police announced Monday, as the US-led coalition said its warplanes had bombed rebel compounds in hours of intense fighting that left 25 militants dead.
Most of the deaths were part of a weekend of bloodshed, with two Taliban suicide blasts killing nearly 20 people, including three German soldiers, and military strikes in the east said to have killed more than 100 insurgents.
The bodies of 11 of the policemen were recovered on Sunday, a day after they were killed by Taliban fighters in the southern province of Helmand, a police commander told AFP on condition of anonymity.
News of the killings was brought by a sole surviving policeman who made it to the town of Gereshk a day after the bloody incident, the official added.
The Taliban said it was responsible.
Three more policemen, including a district counter-criminal chief, were killed in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Monday by a remote-controlled bomb similar to those regularly used by the Taliban, a police spokesman said.
“Seven other policemen were injured. It was the work of the Taliban,” provincial police spokesman Abdul Ghafoor told AFP.
The US-led coalition said meanwhile soldiers fought militants for 14 hours Sunday in Helmand's district of Sangin, where the extremist militia's top commander Mullah Dadullah was found dead 10 days ago.
There were “several confirmed enemy deaths,” the coalition said in a statement.
The Afghan defence ministry said separately “during this operation 25 of our enemies were killed.”
The fighting started when a patrol was attacked three kilometres (two miles) from the Sangin district centre, which was brought under government control in early April after being in Taliban hands.
Attackers were reinforced by about 50 men who arrived on foot and in small boats down the Helmand River, the coalition said.
Air support was called in and bombed seven compounds. The warplanes were also directed against fighters spotted repositioning for an ambush, it said.
The US-led coalition helped to topple the extremist Taliban from government in late 2001 and is now focused on hunting down Taliban militants and their allies in Al-Qaeda.
The force works alongside a separate and larger NATO-led deployment that is also battling rebels, with the larger aim of securing areas to allow for development.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force launched a major operation more than two months ago to secure lawless Helmand but the province still appears largely out of government control.
In another report of casualties to Taliban fighters, the provincial governor of Khost said he had “credible information” that 20 were killed in return fire after they attacked a police checkpost in a remote border town early Monday.
The rebels were however able to remove the bodies, the governor Arsala Jamal told AFP. A Taliban spokesman confirmed the fighting but denied the casualties.
Insurgency-linked violence has intensified across Afghanistan this year with more than 1,500 people, most of them rebels, estimated to have been killed.
