AFGHANISTAN:AN OPERATION by local and international troops appears to have cleared Taliban fighters from the outskirts of Afghanistan's second largest city.
The Afghan national army said the deployment of more than 1,000 troops, aided by Nato soldiers and helicopter gunships, had driven insurgents from Arghandab, from where they had been menacing Kandahar since Monday evening.
"Arghandab has been completely cleared of the enemy," said Gen Mohammad Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the defence ministry, adding that 56 rebels had been killed during sporadic clashes that also claimed the lives of two Afghan soldiers, with a further two injured.
However, tribal elders said hundreds of insurgents died and that they were in discussions about how to return corpses to the Taliban.
The operation, which involved the redeployment of Nato forces from the south and Afghan soldiers flown in from Kabul, was pulled together following reports that up to 600 insurgents had gathered in Arghandab, a farming district 10 miles north of Kandahar.
The complex terrain of grape and pomegranate orchards is an insurgent's paradise - as the Russian army discovered during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The clashes followed the prison break last Saturday that saw up to 400 Taliban fighters escape from Kandahar's main jail. However Gen Azimi said information from army spies who had infiltrated the Taliban showed most of the insurgents involved were from Pakistan rather than local fighters.
Nato, which has almost 53,000 troops in the country, said reports of hundreds of Taliban fighters massing in Arghandab were enemy propaganda and that "no large formations of insurgents were met or spotted".
Akhtar Mohammad, one of the Taliban prisoners to escape last week, claimed in a phone interview with the Financial Times that hundreds of non-foreign fighters remained in the district.
However, Nato officials said there had been no big encounters or heavy bombardments and it was too early to agree with assessments that the Taliban had been evicted.
Militants fighting for the overthrow of the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai have moved away from conventional engagements with foreign forces, preferring ambushes and roadside bombs.
The death of four British troops killed by a Taliban roadside bomb in Afghanistan in a lightly armoured Land-Rover were confirmed yesterday by armed forces minister Bob Ainsworth.
Cpl Sarah Bryant of the Intelligence Corps became the first British woman to die on active service in Afghanistan in the explosion on Tuesday. The other three soldiers were named as Cpl Sean Robert Reeve, Lance Cpl Richard Larkin and Paul Stout.
They were taking part in a planned operation east of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province when their vehicle was blown up.