Three NATO soldiers among 18 killed in Afghanistan (2nd Roundup)

Mar 31, 2008, 15:07 GMT

Kabul - Three NATO soldiers, three Afghan security guards and 12 Taliban militants were killed in separate attacks in the volatile southern Afghanistan, officials said on Monday.

Two NATO-led British soldiers were killed while conducting a patrol in the southern province of Helmand late Sunday when they were caught in a roadside explosion, the British Defence Ministry said in a statement.

The British soldiers were part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which has around 43,000 troops from some 39 countries in war-shattered Afghanistan.

'The soldiers were airlifted to the medical facility at Camp Bastion and one soldier was pronounced dead on arrival and the other died subsequently,' the ISAF in Kabul said in a statement, without identifying the nationalities of the deceased soldiers.

The third NATO soldier, a Dane, was killed and two others were wounded in a fight with insurgents in southern region on Monday, ISAF said in statement.

The injured soldiers were evacuated to the ISAF medical facilities by emergency response helicopters, where they are being treated, it said.

In another incident, three Afghan security guards working for a road construction company in Zherai district of Kandahar were killed when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb on Monday morning in the area, said Neyaz Mohammad Sarhadi, the district chief.

Taliban militants, meanwhile, took responsibility for Sunday's attack in a statement posted at their website, and claimed to have killed or wounded ten British soldiers in the roadside attacks.

'A tank of British forces was blown up by mine in Kajaki district of the province around 6 pm on Sunday,' the Taliban statement said, adding that another tank, which arrived at the scene to evacuate the soldiers, was also blown up by a remote-controlled mine.

The statement said that following the second blast the Taliban fighters opened fire at the NATO soldiers, 'killing and wounding ten in total in all the attacks.'

Nearly 8,000 British troops are deployed in the volatile province of Helmand to help reconstruct the province and to fight Taliban militants, who have waged a bloody insurgency against Afghan and international forces, six years after their regime was ousted.

Besides being the main stronghold for Taliban insurgents, Helmand is also the largest opium producing province in the country. Afghanistan supplies more than 90 per cent of world's heroin.

Meanwhile, the Afghan defence ministry claimed in a statement on Monday that their forces backed by international troops killed at least ten suspected Taliban militants including their local commander, Mullah Qaseem, in Zabul province on Saturday.

The combined forces detained three other militants, during the engagement, it said.

In the neighbouring Kandahar province on Sunday, the army soldiers killed two militants and wounded another three in an operation in Houz Madad area of the province, the statement added.

Taliban insurgents resumed their attacks after a lull during the winter. The insurgency last year left more than 8,000 people - mostly Taliban rebels - dead.