A Canadian soldier was killed during an assault on a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan Sunday as a Peruvian soldier and 21 rebels died in other weekend violence, officials said.
Most of the rebels were killed in an attack by foreign and Afghan troops on an insurgent stronghold around the Panjwayi area of Kandahar province that began early Saturday and continued into Sunday, a coalition spokeswoman said.
The bodies of 10 were discovered on Sunday while five were killed on Saturday, Captain Julie Roberge said.
The Canadian corporal, a reservist, was killed near Panjwayi while "engaging enemy elements," Lieutenant Commander Mark MacIntyre said.
Three other coalition soldiers, two of them Canadians, were wounded in Panjwayi on Saturday. One was evacuated to a military hospital in Germany with serious injuries, military officials said.
The Canadian was the 17th soldier from his country to be killed in Afghanistan since 2001, when US-led forces toppled the hard-line Taliban regime.
An upsurge of Taliban-linked violence has killed more than 50 foreign soldiers in the country this year, most of them Americans. Afghan, British, Canadian and US soldiers are involved in a major anti-Taliban operation, Mountain Thrust, that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of militants since it was launched mid-May.
In other violence over the weekend a Peruvian soldier serving with a Spanish contingent with the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was killed in a blast in the west of the country on Saturday.
The blast was probably caused by an anti-tank mine set off by remote control, Spanish Defence Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said Sunday.
Four other soldiers were wounded in the explosion about 60 kilometres (37 miles) from the city of Farah.
Late Friday five Taliban were killed after coalition soldiers returned fire after an ambush in Zabul province that wounded five of the foreign troops, the coalition said in a statement.
In another incident Saturday an "enemy combatant" was killed in a clash in eastern Laghman province, the Afghan defence ministry said.
And in south-eastern Uruzgan province police arrested four militants with explosive devices and 300,000 dollars' worth of Iranian and Pakistani currency, a ministry statement said.
Southern and eastern Afghanistan are being pounded daily by violence linked to a growing Taliban insurgency - either strikes by troops or ambushes and bombings by the rebels.
Civilians are often caught up in the violence which has only grown despite the presence of thousands of foreign troops and the growing capacity of the Afghan security forces.
As despondency grows about the grinding unrest, President Hamid Karzai has called for a new approach to tackling the insurgency.
He said last month this conflict-weary country could not forever be a battlefield for the US-led "war on terror" and the international community must focus on the sources of funding and training of militants across the border. Afghan officials often say al Qaeda and Taliban operatives - possibly including their fugitive leaders - are hiding out in Pakistan where radical madrassas or Islamic schools are churning out fighters for the rebel cause.
The allegations sparked a bitter war of words this year between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which was one of three international allies of the Taliban regime before turning its back on the movement after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Weeks later the Taliban regime was toppled for sheltering al Qaeda leaders.
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