Battle at Afghan Military Base Kills 14

By NOOR KHAN

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Militants attacked a coalition forces base in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, sparking a battle that killed two foreign soldiers and at least 12 rebels, the U.S. military said. At least one of the soldiers was American.

Four foreign troops and an Afghan soldier were wounded in the battle in Helmand province, the military said in a statement. The region is a hotbed of insurgency and center of the booming drugs trade in Afghanistan.

The attack followed separate roadside bombings in the region Tuesday that killed six Afghan soldiers and four private security workers. Suspected Taliban militants with explosives strapped to their bodies also blew themselves up in the southern city of Kandahar, but no other casualties were reported in that blast, a provincial official said.

In Wednesday’s incident, the troops called in aircraft to attack the militants and together with the forces inside the base "are believed to have killed at least a dozen enemy insurgents," the statement said. But it added the military was still conducting a full assessment of the battle.

Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata said the troops "defeated a significant enemy element."

The wounded soldiers were rushed for treatment to a base in Kandahar. The names of the deceased were withheld pending notification of next of kin.

The military statement did not say whether the attack was believed linked to the drugs trade. Helmand is Afghanistan’s main opium poppy growing region and there have been fears of widespread violence since an aggressive poppy eradication campaign started in recent weeks.

Helmand’s rugged mountains are also popular hiding places for Taliban rebels, many of whom are believed to slip back and forth across the province’s largely unguarded border with Pakistan.

One of Tuesday’s roadside bombings struck an army vehicle on a road in Helmand province northwest of Kandahar, killing six Afghan soldiers, said Gen. Rehmatullah Raufi, a top Afghan army official in the province. He blamed the Taliban for the attack, but offered no evidence.

"We know that it is the work of Taliban terrorists, and our forces are trying to trace and capture them," he told The Associated Press.

Hours earlier, a roadside bomb exploded as a Namibian and three Afghans working for Houston-based U.S. Protection and Investigations were driving in a convoy on the main road linking Kandahar city with Herat, the main city in western Afghanistan. The company provides security for a construction company in the area.

Bill Dupre, the firm’s deputy managing director in Kabul, said the victims’ vehicle caught the "full brunt" of the remote-controlled bomb blast, killing the four instantly. Several other vehicles in the convoy returned to their camp safely, he said.

Nimroz Gov. Ghulam Dusthaqir Azad blamed the Taliban for that assault as well.

The suspected militants blew themselves up after they were confronted by police Tuesday morning on a main street in Kandahar, provincial Gov. Asadullah Khalid said.

Khalid said he thought the two bombers were militants, adding that authorities had received intelligence that suicide attackers were planning to enter the city, a former Taliban stronghold.

Afghanistan, particularly the country’s volatile south, has seen a wave of suicide attacks in recent months, an apparent shift in tactics by militant supporters of the hardline militia that was ousted by U.S.-led airstrikes in late 2001.