NATO says kills al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan

KABUL (Reuters) - An airstrike in east Afghanistan has killed a senior al Qaeda commander who coordinated attacks by foreign fighters and arranged for them to travel to the region, and an al Qaeda explosives expert, NATO said on Wednesday.

Abdallah Umar al-Qurayshi was killed when a precision bomb targeted the compound where he was staying in the Korengal valley, a remote area near the Pakistan border from which foreign troops withdrew in April, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.

Qurayshi helped foreigners travel to Afghanistan to fight in the growing insurgency, ISAF said, and managed attacks by groups of these fighters in the provinces of Kunar and Nuristan.

It was not possible to get independent confirmation of the location of the airstrike or the identity of the dead.

This has been the bloodiest year since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban government, with the insurgency gaining strength despite the presence of nearly 150,000 foreign forces.

Rising violence is a deep concern in Washington, where U.S. President Barack Obama is due to conduct a strategy review of the war in December. He plans a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops starting in July 2011 if conditions at the time allow.

The missile that targeted Qurayshi also killed al Qaeda explosives expert Abu Atta al Kuwaiti and several foreign fighters of Arab origin, ISAF said, adding that there may also have been other high-level insurgent commanders present.

The attack happened on Saturday, but the names of the men killed were not released until Wednesday.

Another senior al Qaeda leader, Shaikh al-Fateh, is also believed to have been killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike in a Pakistani tribal region on the Afghan border this week, intelligence officials said on Tuesday.

Many al Qaeda members and Taliban fled to northwestern Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun belt after 2001.

From their sanctuaries there, the militants have orchestrated insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The United States has stepped up pilotless drone aircraft attacks on suspected militant hideouts in the Pakistani tribal region in recent months, at least 20 in September alone. (Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)