By IRNA,
Kabul : Five Afghan children died during a firefight between soldiers and Taliban rebels in the southern province of Uruzgan, Afghan government said on Friday.
The deputy provincial police chief, Mohammad Gulab, said the dead were three children, a man and a woman from a single family and that another seven people were wounded in the incident, in a village near the provincial capital.
Gulab said 11 Taliban were killed in a separate battle Thursday in Uruzgan in which an international soldier also died.
Meanwhile, the new U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Kabul after four days in Pakistan in his new role as President Barack Obama’s point man on the conflict which has become a U.S. foreign policy priority.
On his first day in Afghanistan, Holbrooke is to meet the ministers of defense and interior and the head of the national intelligence agency, before meeting President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, an Afghan official said.