More than 100 people including dozens of civilians were killed in violence related to Afghanistan's ongoing war against the Taliban in the past week, authorities said Sunday. The interior ministry registered about 144 insurgency-related incidents - mostly roadside bombings and militant ambushes - from April 11-18, spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
A total of 117 people - 36 of them civilians, 20 policemen and more than 60 insurgents - were killed in the incidents, he told reporters. Another 100 civilians, 39 police officers and more than a dozen rebels, were injured in the attacks, he said.
Most of the rebels were killed in an operation by Afghan and international forces against Taliban-linked militants in the restive northern province of Baghlan, he said.
In the same period, nine Western soldiers, part of the international military deployment under Nato and the United States, were killed, according to an AFP count based on the icasualties.org website which tracks coalition deaths.
The latest death was reported Sunday by Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which said a foreign soldier had been killed by a roadside bomb in the most volatile part of the country. The soldier, whose nationality was not given, was the third to die as a result of a Taliban-style attack using an improvised explosive device (IED) on Saturday, the statement said.
It did not say if the incident was the same as one previously announced by the defence ministry in the Netherlands that killed two Dutch soldiers in Uruzgan province. The latest death takes to 165 the number of foreign troops killed so far in 2010, according to an AFP toll based on the independent icasualties.org website.
There are 126,000 US and Nato troops in Afghanistan fighting a virulent insurgency concentrated in the country's south. Deployment will peak at 150,000 in August as the coalition attempts to bring a swift end to the war so that troops can begin to withdraw from mid-2011. Around 1,950 Dutch troops are deployed in Afghanistan, with 23 having died since the Dutch mission started in 2006.
Dutch troops are set to start withdrawing from Uruzgan in August, and to have completed their withdrawal by year-end. The Dutch government collapsed in February in a spat over whether to extend the deployment. Nato and the United States currently deploy 126,000 troops to fight the insurgents, with the number set to peak at 150,000 by August.