Coalition Forces Close in on Regrouped Taliban

Afghan forces, backed by US air strikes, said they were closing in on hundreds of suspected Taliban fighters in the remote mountains of southern Afghanistan yesterday as intense fighting between the two sides stretched into its sixth day.

Coalition aircraft pounded hillsides in Dai Chopan, a district of the southern province of Zabul, in a three-hour dawn raid, a local intelligence chief said. Hundreds of government soldiers supported by US special forces then entered the area, trying to corner the rebels holed up in the mountain gorges.

Despite a 22-month military campaign against the Taliban, the militant group has staged a series of increasingly audacious and brutal attacks on military and civilian targets that has alarmed the government of President Hamid Karzai and frustrated US officials.

Pentagon officials acknowledge there have been signs of a growing threat from reconstituted Taliban and al-Qaeda forces but argue that the increased number of clashes is as much a reflection of offensive operations by US forces working alongside Afghan troops as it is of the Islamist guerrillas' strength.

"It has always been the case along this porous border with Pakistan that there are remnants of Taliban and al-Qaeda, and they are still there and they are regrouping to some degree," a Pentagon official said. "But we're getting stronger, and the Afghan army is now a partner ... Our side is making gains."

Afghan officials have been troubled by the resurgent group's ability to muster increasingly large forces in the remote hills that straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border, and Kabul's and Washington's patience with Islamabad has worn thin.

John McCain, the US senator, said during a visit to Pakistan this month that Islamabad was "not doing as much as it can" to stop attacks across its border.

Meanwhile, aid organisations in the destitute southern border regions say attacks over the past two months have added new no-go zones. "There has definitely been a deterioration," said Rod Volway, who heads the operations of Mercy Corps in the southern province of Kandahar. "Now the problem is also getting to random attacks in areas that were generally peaceful."

Afghan officials said yesterday they saw 14 dead fighters following the US bombardment, the Associated Press reported, but this could not be confirmed by US military officials. Col Rodney Davis, spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan, confirmed at least 33 insurgents had been killed since fighting began on Monday.

As the fighting raged in the southern mountains, coalition forces clashed with rebels near the south-eastern border town of Shkhin, in Paktika province. A US military spokesman in Bagram, the coalition's headquarters in Afghanistan, said four enemy combatants were killed, at the cost of two Americans killed.