Over 40 Taliban killed in Afghanistan-US military

KABUL, Sep 6 (Reuters) Afghan and US-led coalition forces killed more than 40 insurgents in a 12-hour battle in a restive southern province, taking the guerrilla death toll to nearly 200 in a fortnight, the US military said today.

Suspected Islamist Taliban insurgents ambushed a coalition patrol in villages in Kandahar province's Shah Wali Kot district with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the US military said in a statement.

Kandahar has been the site of repeated clashes in recent months.

''The extremist fighters were visually observed firing on the patrol from compounds located within the villages,'' the statement said.

''Throughout the engagement, insurgents reinforced their positions with an estimated 150 additional fighters. Coalition aircraft destroyed the positively identified enemy firing positions with precision guided munitions.'' The Taliban said they were unaware of any ground fighting in the Shah Wali Kot district yesterday, but said they had downed an American helicopter in the area.

''The chopper is completely burnt and everyone on board is dead,'' Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf said by telephone from an undisclosed location. ''Whenever we blow up the Americans they claim such things to confuse the people.

''It is totally baseless. If the Americans had killed 200 of our mujahideen, we would have killed 50 of them as well.'' NATO denied a helicopter had been lost.

''Nothing was shot down in Shah Wali Kot or anywhere else in the south,'' a NATO spokesman said.

There was no independent account of how many people were killed or what had happened.

The US-led military says coalition forces have killed hundreds of Taliban in a spree of confrontations in recent weeks. The Taliban have admitted some losses, but say Afghan and foreign troops vastly exaggerate enemy death tolls.

Yesterday's fighting came as two British soldiers and more than two dozen Islamist Taliban insurgents were killed in southern Afghanistan in separate incidents, the US military and British Ministry of Defence said.

The two soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, The Mercian Regiment were killed when an explosion hit their vehicle in the southern province of Helmand. A third soldier and a civilian interpreter were also wounded.

More than 7,000 people have been killed during the past 19 months in Afghanistan, the bloodiest period since the resurgent Taliban's overthrow in 2001.

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