Three Nato soldiers were killed when their patrol ran into a roadside bomb in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nuristan on Tuesday, military officials said, as violence surged ahead of the first winter snowfalls.
A fourth soldier was wounded in the blast, a Nato spokesman said. The nationality of the soldiers was withheld, but US troops form the bulk of Nato force deployed in the remote, mountainous province.
A Taliban-led insurgency has intensified this year, surprising Nato generals who took over command of foreign forces in Afghanistan from the United States, with more 3,100 people killed in the past 10 months.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast in Nuristan, where loyalists of a militant leader and former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are also active.
In a separate incident, two Nato soldiers were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near the soldiers' convoy in Ghazni province to the south-west of Kabul, a spokesman for the organisation said.
One Afghan policeman along with the bomber died in the attack, a provincial official said. Nato has reported high numbers of Taliban casualties in a series of clashes across the south and east, as fighting ramped up during mild autumnal weather.
On Monday, Nato said its forces killed 75 insurgents in a clash in the southern province of Zabul and in an air strike in neighbouring Kandahar. One Nato soldier was killed in Zabul. A Taliban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, however, put militant losses at only a handful, and said most of the people killed were Afghan villagers.
This year's violence is the worst experienced since US-led coalition troops overthrew the Taliban government in 2001, and hundreds of civilians, aid workers, Afghan troops have been among the casualties. Over 150 foreign troops have been killed. Nato has some 31,000 troops under its command in Afghanistan, the biggest ground operation by the alliance in its history.
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