By DPA,
Kabul : At least 37 people, among them 31 Taliban militants and three coalition soldiers, were killed in fighting in Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.
Three coalition soldiers and a local contractor were killed in a roadside bomb blast in eastern part of the country, the US military said in a statement.
Fifteen Taliban rebels were killed when NATO aircraft targeted a group of militants who were surrounded by Afghan police forces in southern Afghanistan, police said.
The aerial bombing took place Monday night after local police forces, acting on intelligence information, surrounded a garden in Sozak village outside Tarin Kot, the provincial capital of Uruzgan province, a police official said.
“We had intelligence information that the Taliban had gathered in the garden to plan their terrorist attacks in the province,” the official said, adding that once the area was pinpointed, NATO aircraft were called in to bomb the militants.
Twelve other militants were killed in Zadran district of Paktia province in the southeast Monday after a group of Taliban militants attacked the district centre, Rohullah Samoon, spokesman for the provincial governor, said.
Samoon said nine of the insurgents were Chechens and the others were Afghan and Pakistanis.
NATO-led forces also confirmed the incident and said that 20 insurgents attacked the district centre with light weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.
“The combined force, including air support, killed most of the insurgents,” the alliance statement said, adding that no Afghan or NATO forces were killed or wounded in the battle.
Four insurgents and one Afghan policeman were killed in a firefight in the southwestern province of Wardak early Tuesday, government spokesman Adam Khan Sirat said.
An Afghan army soldier was killed and two were wounded when bomb fixed on a bicycle was detonated by a remote control in southern Kandahar city Tuesday, the defence ministry spokesman said.