Nineteen Taliban killed as Kandahar reels under suicide blasts

KANDAHAR: Security forces killed 19 Taliban rebels in southern Afghanistan on Sunday as the city of Kandahar reeled from twin suicide blasts that killed two Canadian soldiers and four civilians.

Another 17 rebels, including two Pakistani nationals, were arrested in the raid carried out by Afghan forces in southern Helmand province, deputy provincial governor Mullah Amir Akhundzada said.

The operation around the provincial capital Lashkar Gah was launched after elders from several villages complained that Taliban were intimidating residents, including by allegedly extorting money from them, he said.

Taliban rebels are extremely active in Helmand, launching regular attacks on British forces there and briefly capturing two districts last weeks. About 100 kilometres (60 miles) to the east, Kandahar was still in shock after two suicide blasts that took place about an hour apart on Saturday.

The first was a suicide car bomb that ripped into a Canadian patrol and killed two soldiers. Eight others were wounded, one of whom had to be airlifted to Germany for special treatment. Ten Afghans were wounded.

In the second blast, an attacker blew himself up among a crowd of people who had assembled about 100 metres (yards) from the site of the first explosion.

Four Afghan passers-by were killed, the police ministry said Sunday, dropping the death toll issued by officials soon after the blast by two. Another 25 people were wounded, it said in a statement.

"Since the suicide bombers were blown to pieces, and totally destroyed, their identity could not be verified," the statement said.

The extremist Taliban movement said it had carried out the attacks, with the second deliberately timed to cause maximum casualties.

The Taliban have carried out scores of suicide attacks in Afghanistan but most have been in Kandahar, the capital of the province with the same name where the religious movement picked up arms in the early 1990s and rose to take control of government in 1996.

The regular attacks -- which are usually aimed at military forces but kill more civilians -- have terrorised the city.

On Sunday, people crowded the city hospital to visit relatives wounded in the suicide blasts but the streets were emptier than usual.

Afghan soldiers guarded main roads as small groups of residents ventured cautiously out to the site of the blasts.

Around 60 foreign troops have been killed in hostile action in Afghanistan this year as the Taliban insurgency has shown more sophistication and Afghan and international forces have pushed deeper into rebel-held areas.

Nineteen Canadian troops have been killed since soldiers from the country arrived here in the months after the Taliban were toppled from government by a US-led coalition in late 2001.

The deployment swelled to around 2,300 this year as more foreign forces have deployed to the south ahead of the coalition's transfer of authority to a NATO-led force, due at month's end.

The new arrivals have included about 2,300 British troops who have faced a barrage of attacks since setting up in Helmand province. Six British soldiers were killed in action in a three-week stretch.

The Telegraph newspaper in London reported Sunday that British troops were to be "tactically withdrawn" from isolated military outposts in the province following the deadly attacks.

Commanders believe that the positioning of troops at isolated outposts was a mistake because it gave the Taliban "military initiative", the newspaper reported without identifying its sources.

Meanwhile, three policemen were killed and three kidnapped in a Taliban attack on a police checkpoint in southern Ghazni province late Saturday, police said.

And a small bomb exploded about 100 metres (yards) from the gates of the US embassy in the capital late Saturday, causing no damage. Another was found Sunday.