The number of Taliban killed in a major operation underway in southern Afghanistan passed 100 on Wednesday, US-led coalition said after earlier announcing 61 were dead, AFP reports.The fighting, involving international ground and air forces, started on Tuesday in the Musa Qala district of the southern province of Helmand, the coalition said in a statement. “The initial estimate by the ground force commander assessed that more than 104 insurgents were killed thus far in the engagement,” the statement said.
Musa Qala district centre was captured by the extremist Taliban in early February and has been in rebel control since, becoming one of the insurgentsÂ’ major strongholds. There have been a handful of major battles in Afghanistan this year in which international militaries have said the number of rebels killed had passed 100.
The NATO-led force, which operates alongside the coalition, said in a separate statement on Wednesday that more than 65 rebel fighters were killed late on Tuesday in a similar battle in the south-central province of Uruzgan. Apart from the killing of one foreign soldier in Helmand, which was reported earlier, there were no other casualties among Afghan and coalition troops, Reuters reported. On Wednesday, more than 1,000 people staged a demonstration against foreign troops, saying they killed two Islamic clerics overnight in southern Kandahar provinceÂ’s Zhari district and carried out house searches in the area.
Militants fire rockets: Militants also fired rocket-propelled grenades at a radio station in an insurgency-plagued province south of the Afghan capital, wounding a security guard, AP quoted the police as saying on Wednesday.
The attack late on Monday night in Logar province sparked a one-hour battle between the radio station guards and insurgents, said Qudratullah Arabzai, the provincial police chief of criminal investigations. Some equipment at the Milli Paygham - or National Message - radio station was damaged, station director Muhammad Nassir Mudasir said.