Kabul: A roadside bomb attack killed three
NATO troops in eastern Afghanistan, one of the deadliest
flashpoints in the 10-year war against Taliban insurgents, the
military said on Wednesday.
NATO's US-led International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) did not release the nationalities of the troops or give
further details of the incident, which happened yesterday.
The deaths take to 561 the number of foreign troops
killed in Afghanistan so far this year, according to a news agency tally based on figures from independent website
iCasualties.org.
A total of 711 foreign troops were killed in Afghanistan
last year, the highest annual total since the US-led invasion
in 2001 ousted the Taliban from power.
There are about 130,000 international troops in
Afghanistan fighting the Taliban-led insurgency, with 91,000
of them from the United States.
Much of the worst fighting takes place in the east of the
country, close to the border with Pakistan, where US and
Afghan officials say the Taliban use rear bases to regroup and
plot attacks.
Pakistan closed its supply routes to NATO after US air
strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26 close to
the mountainous, porous border.
Amid declining support for the war and a gloomy economy
in the West, all foreign combat troops are due to withdraw
from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, by which time Afghan
forces and officials are supposed to take full control.
Yesterday, President Hamid Karzai called on NATO to
disband an irregular security force operating in northern
provinces, saying it had been set up "unilaterally" without
coordination with the Afghan government.
NATO said today that all such security programmes are
being disbanded or shifted to Afghan government control.
PTI
First Published: Wednesday, December 28, 2011, 16:18