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50 Taliban, 8 policemen dead in Afghanistan

KANDAHAR: Fifty Taliban and eight policemen were killed in various clashes in Afghanistan on Wednesday as NATO looked for reinforcements to combat an insurgency in the south.

In other violence, two rockets were fired into an eastern city hours before President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s prime minister arrived on a short visit, and a suspected suicide bomber blew himself up in the southern city of Kandahar.

A provincial government spokesman in the southeastern province of Ghazni said Afghan security forces killed 50 militants in a major operation centred on three villages. Spokesman Abdul Ali Fakuri could not immediately say how many casualties there were among Afghan police or soldiers. Sixteen Taliban fighters were killed in the province on Tuesday.

Dozens of Taliban meanwhile attacked a police convoy in remote western Afghanistan, kicking off a battle that left four policemen and four of the attackers dead, an official said. The police convoy was attacked mid-afternoon in Farah province.

“Fighting erupted. Four of our policemen were killed, 11 were wounded,” provincial police chief Sayed Agha Saceb said. “Four Taliban were also killed — they left behind the bodies.” Police in volatile eastern Kunar province said meanwhile that four of their colleagues were killed when a bomb exploded under their vehicle. Two of the dead were low-level commanders.

The rockets struck the eastern city of Jalalabad at around 8:00 am, about two hours before Karzai and Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz arrived to open a new road between the city and the Pakistan border.

One hit the outskirts of the airport compound and the other hit a civilian home but neither caused any damage, Nangarhar province police spokesman Ghafoor Khan said. It was not clear if they were timed to coincide with the president’s visit. In another incident on Wednesday, a suspected suicide attacker was killed and a civilian suffered minor injuries in an apparently premature blast at a mosque in the southern city of Kandahar, police and witnesses said. AFP

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