[MtnGoat]

NATO escapes two bombs in Afghanistan, 25 Taliban killed

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - Two bombs exploded near NATO patrols in an area of southern Afghanistan that saw a series of bloody attacks a day earlier, while security forces said they had killed 25 rebels.


The violence Friday further highlighted the dangers facing a NATO force that took command of the country's volatile south on Monday and which has lost seven soldiers in rebel attacks since then.

However Afghanistan's US-backed President Hamid Karzai assured his countrymen that a plan was in place to secure war-weary Afghanistan.

The early morning bombs exploded in restive Kandahar province as NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) patrols passed, but caused no damage or casualties to the force, a spokesman said.

The first destroyed a civilian vehicle and some reports said it may have been a vehicle-borne suicide bomb of the sort that killed 21 people in a crowded bazaar in the same area on Thursday, Major Quentin Innes said.

Separately, the US-led coalition that handed over control of the south to NATO this week said its forces and Afghan troops had killed 25 Taliban "extremists" on Thursday in Helmand province, neighbouring Kandahar.

The rebels were killed after they attacked the security force with small-arms and rocket-propelled grenades during a coalition "cordon and search" mission in a village, it said in a statement.

The coalition, which has been in Afghanistan since helping to overthrow the Taliban regime in late 2001, is maintaining a counter-terrorism force alongside NATO forces in the restive area.

However, bloodshed has spiked even by southern Afghanistan's grim standards since the official handover to NATO this week.

Friday's attacks on the NATO patrols in Kandahar were in Maiwand district, near where two early morning roadside bombs on Thursday killed a Canadian soldier and wounded four.

A suicide attacker later Thursday detonated a car bomb in a crowded bazaar in Panjwayi, adjoining Maiwand, as a NATO convoy passed through on the way to fetch vehicles damaged in the earlier blasts.

Twenty-one Afghans, including children, were killed and 13 wounded in the blast, one of the biggest in a series of suicide bombings this year by the Taliban movement which was born in Kandahar in the early 1990s.

Then three more Canadians were killed in an ambush by Taliban insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades in the same area as the earlier roadside explosions.

The one-eyed fugitive leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, once lived in Maiwand and the district, along with Panjwayi, has been the target of major US-led coalition strikes this year that have killed scores of rebels.

Operations were continuing in the area on Friday to secure a major east-to-west highway running through it. The same road was the site of the attacks on the NATO troops on Thursday.

"There will be a return engagement," Innes told AFP, declining to give details of ongoing operations.

"We have been asked by local people in Panjwayi to sort out Taliban that are in the area and that is what we intend to do."

ISAF on Monday assumed command of 8,000 troops including from Britain, Canada, The Netherlands and the United States in Afghanistan's six southern province, a move the alliance admits is its most challenging.

Three British ISAF soldiers were killed on Tuesday in lawless Helmand -- the biggest contributor to Afghanistan's opium crop -- where the bulk of ISAF's British force of about 4,000 soldiers is based.

Karzai expressed sorrow at the deaths and condemned the attackers as cowards.

"We have begun very broad actions ... You will see some actions that will finally earn security for Afghanistan," he told reporters.

They included strengthening the security forces and administration, and working more closely with international and regional countries in the "war on terror," he said.