132 Taliban dead, 4 commanders under siege

KABUL, Friday (AFP) Afghan and US forces have killed 132 Taliban militants and surrounded four of the ousted regime's top commanders after a three-day battle in the south of the country, officials said.

The brother-in-law of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar is one of the key figures under siege in a mountain hideout, the Afghan defence ministry said. The claim could not be independently confirmed. "One-hundred-and-thirty-two Taliban were killed," in the operation in a restive area on the borders of Kandahar, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces, defence ministry spokesman Mohammed Nu'man Atifie told AFP.

"If you look at the number of the men they've lost we can say that their backbone is broken," Atifie added. "It has been a great, great success for the government." Thirty-two rebels were killed when the offensive began early Tuesday and a further 100 insurgents were killed later Tuesday and in the early hours of Wednesday morning in Mian Nisheen district, the spokesman said. Six foreign fighters were among the dead, Kandahar police chief General Mohammed Salem told AFP.

"They have found two Chechen nationals, three Pakistanis, and one Arab," Salem added saying that 10 Taliban fighters including a Pakistani national were captured alive Thursday.

Salem said the four top Taliban commanders were not among the prisoners but gave no further details. Most of the militant deaths occurred when US warplanes armed with laser-guided bombs and supported by British aircraft pounded suspected Taliban safe havens, US and Afghan officials said.

Around 200 Afghan police and many more Afghan and US-led coalition troops were hunting down surviving pockets of rebels hiding out in valleys in the "black triangle" -- named after the Taliban's distinctive black turbans.

Four Taliban commanders including Mullah Brader, who is related by marriage to the one-eyed Mullah Omar and is also said to be the militia's current deputy, have been ringed by government forces north of Mian Nisheen, Atifie said.

Three Afghan policemen were also killed in the operation, Kandahar province police chief Mohammed Ayoob Salangi told AFP. The US military has said five American soldiers were wounded. The Taliban's usual spokesman was not immediately available to comment. However, Pakistan-based private Afghan Islamic Press said the militia's spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi told it by telephone that no important Taliban commander was surrounded in Mian Nisheen.

Meanwhile Taliban guerrillas killed a candidate in Afghanistan's parliamentary election and two of his bodyguards in an ambush in the central province of Uruzgan, the provincial governor said on Thursday. Haji Mohammad Wali was killed on Wednesday night in the province's Chora district, when attackers opened fire on his vehicle, Uruzgan governor Jan Mohammad Khan told Reuters.

"This was the work of the Taliban," he said.

Wali was the second candidate in the Sept. 18 election to be killed in an attack blamed on the guerrillas, who officials fear plan to step up attacks to disrupt the vote.

In May, politician Akhtar Mohammad Khan was killed as he travelled along a road in Ghazni province southwest of the capital Kabul.