Seven U.S. troops killed as Afghan violence flares

By Paul Tait

KABUL (Reuters) - Seven U.S. soldiers were killed in attacks across Afghanistan on Monday, including four in one bombing in the north, amid a spike in violence as the U.S. military pushed ahead with a big new offensive, officials said.

In southern Kandahar, a suicide bomber also killed two people when he drove a car packed with explosives toward a line of truck drivers waiting to supply foreign troops at a key base in a province long considered the heartland of the Taliban insurgency.

In Zabul, north of Kandahar, two more U.S. soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb, a U.S. military spokesman said.

Kandahar is adjacent to Helmand province, where thousands of Marines launched a new assault last week to wrest the initiative from the Taliban in a province which supplies most of the opium poppy that funds the insurgency.

The roadside bombing in Kunduz province was the worst security incident involving foreign troops in the north for several weeks. Northern Afghanistan is considered relatively safe compared with Taliban strongholds in the south and east.

Kunduz police chief Abdul Razaaq said two Afghan civilians were also killed. Chief Petty Officer Brian Naranjo, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, confirmed the dead soldiers in Kunduz were American but gave no further details.

"There was a joint police and NATO patrol which was hit by a roadside bomb to the east to the city," Razaaq told Reuters.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks in Kunduz and Kandahar, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said.

German Defense Ministry spokesman Thomas Raabe said in Berlin a NATO team training Afghan forces was traveling in an armored humvee vehicle when it was hit by the bomb. Germany has about 3,700 troops in Afghanistan, most of them in the north.

In eastern Paktia, another U.S. soldier was killed during an engagement with insurgents, a U.S. military spokeswoman said.

NEW STRATEGY

The U.S. Marines are the biggest wave of 17,000 new combat troops ordered into Afghanistan by U.S. President Barack Obama by the end of this year as part of his new regional strategy to defeat the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan.

The Helmand offensive, Operation Strike of the Sword, was launched at a time when insurgency-related violence was at its highest since the Taliban's austere Islamist government was ousted in 2001 for failing to hand over al Qaeda leaders wanted over the September 11 attacks on the United States.

While no major battles have been reported in Helmand since it began last Thursday, attacks across the country since then have killed civilians as well as Afghan and foreign soldiers.

In Kandahar, the Taliban's base in the early 1990s where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden also lived for a time, the suicide bomber drove his car up to a line of supply trucks near the sprawling NATO base at Kandahar Air Field.