Six police, US soldier, killed in Afghan violence

By Mirwais Afghan

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Taliban insurgents
attacked a police post on Friday killing six policemen as
gunmen opened fire on a patrol in a separate incident, killing
a U.S. soldier, officials said.

Violence has surged in Afghanistan since the Taliban
announced last month they had launched a spring offensive in
their campaign to rid the country of foreign forces and topple
the Western-backed government.

A senior government official in the southern province of
Kandahar said the six police were killed in an attack on their
post in the Maiwand district in the early hours of Friday.

A Taliban spokesman said by telephone from an undisclosed
location Taliban fighters carried out the attack and seven
policemen had been killed.

The U.S. military said a patrol came under small-arms fire
in the central province of Uruzgan while investigating a
weapons cache. One U.S. soldier was killed and an Afghan army
man was wounded, it said.

Thirteen American troops have been killed in an intensified
Taliban insurgency this year. Nearly 60 Americans were killed
last year, the worst for U.S. forces since they invaded in 2001
to oust the Taliban from power.

NATO TROOPS ARRIVING

The U.S. military did not say who the gunmen were believed
to be but Uruzgan is a known Taliban hotspot.

“We will continue to relentlessly pursue the enemy and help
the Afghan National Army bring security to the people of
Afghanistan,” U.S. military spokesman Thomas Collins said in a
statement.

The wounded Afghan soldier was evacuated to the southern
city of Kandahar for treatment.

Despite the rising violence, the United States is planning
to trim its force of more than 19,000 troops in Afghanistan by
several thousand, while NATO partners, including Britain,
Canada and the Netherlands, are sending thousands more.

Up to 1,600 Dutch troops will move in to Uruzgan in coming
months as a NATO-led peacekeeping force expands into the
volatile south.

About 2,200 Canadian troops are based in Kandahar while
about 3,300 British troops will in coming weeks be arriving in
another violence-plagued southern province, Helmand.

Mohayouddin Khan, spokesman for the Helmand provincial
governor, said aircraft of a U.S.-led international force had
bombed a district in the south of the province on Thursday,
inflicting an unknown number of casualties.

A resident of the Deshu district, Faisal Mohammad, said 14
civilians had been killed and two wounded in the bombing.

A U.S. military spokeswoman said she had no immediate
information about any operation in the area.

(Additional reporting by Robert Birsel)