Seven Taliban leaders killed in airstrike
24 September, 2012
LASHKAR GAH: Seven local Taliban leaders were killed and a shadowy district governor detained following an air raid operation in southern Afghan province of Helmand overnight, a provincial police spokesman said Sunday.
"Based on intelligence, a warplane with the NATO-led coalition forces carried out an airstrike against a Taliban hideout in Trikh Nawar area of Naway-i- Barakzai district in the wee hours Sunday, killing seven insurgents' leaders including Mullah Hazrat and Mullah Yasin," police spokesman Farid Ahmad Farhang said.
He said a joint Afghan and coalition forces unit launched a post-strike assessment operation, detaining the Taliban shadowy governor for the district named Mullah Ahmad Mubarak, who got injured in the attack in the province 555 km south of Afghan capital Kabul.
The Taliban, who have been waging an insurgency of more than one decade, have yet to confirm the death of the insurgent commanders.
Notorious for growing poppy and militancy, the Helmand province has been branded as Taliban hotbed in the restive southern part of insurgency-hit country.
The last of 33,000 U.S. additional forces, which were deployed to Afghanistan in early 2010 with the aim of pushing back the Taliban-led insurgency, have withdrawn from Afghanistan, the U.S. military had announced.
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