KABUL, Aug 30, (Agen-cies): Seven US troops were killed in two Taleban-style bomb attacks Monday in southern Afghanistan, the area hardest hit by the insurgency nearing the end of its ninth and most deadly year, NATO told AFP.

One attack killed five soldiers, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.
With the latest deaths, 478 foreign soldiers, including 315 Americans, have been killed in the Afghan war so far this year, according to a tally based on that kept by the icasualties.org website. Seven US soldiers were killed in a wave of attacks at the weekend.

The war is dragging towards its 10th year since the toppling of the Taleban regime in late 2001, with almost 150,000 United States and NATO troops in the country battling to quell the insurgency.
A total of 2,046 foreign troops have died in the conflict, 1,262 of them Americans.
The Taleban leadership has said that anyone associated with the foreign forces, with foreign organisations or the government of President Hamid Karzai is a legitimate target.
Officials are regular victims, with a bomb blast in the eastern city of Jalalabad Monday killing a district chief and wounding up to five others.

“The explosion targeted the vehicle of La’al Poor district chief Sayed Mohammad Pahlawan at 9:15am this morning,” said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, spokesman for Nangahar province, of which Jalalabad is the capital.

“He was on his way to the office of the provincial governor,” he told AFP.
He said the explosives had been placed in Pahlawan’s car and detonated by remote control, adding that the wounded included three of his bodyguards.
The vehicle exploded just 15 metres (yards) from the governor’s office, he said.

The interior ministry condemned the killing of Pahlawan as an “un-Islamic and inhumane act by insurgents”. It said five other people were wounded in the blast.

Jalalabad, more than two hours drive east of Kabul, has seen a recent escalation in violent incidents as Taleban-led insurgents spread their footprint in reaction to an increased presence of foreign forces.
The insurgency is at its most intense in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, but it has rapidly spread to other regions in the past year.

NATO is struggling to turn the tide on the Taleban but officials say that the arrival of 30,000 extra troops, as part of US President Barack Obama’s surge aimed at speeding an end to the war, is having an impact.

Officials in southern Zabul province, neighbouring Kandahar, said 24 insurgents, including two Taleban commanders, were captured in a joint Afghan-coalition operation Sunday while trying to cross into Pakistan.

ISAF said Monday it was investigating reports that one of its convoys had been hit in a bombing in Kandahar province. An AFP reporter at the scene on the Kandahar-Herat highway said one of the ISAF armoured vehicles was on fire.

Separately, Afghan intelligence agency the National Directorate of Security (NDS) said it had seized “a large amount of military equipment including arms and munitions” from a private security firm.
It said the materiel was “being illegally transferred by a private security company from Kabul city to the airport and then to unknown destination”.

The NDS statement named the security firm as Blue Hackle, a member of the British Association of Private Security Companies.

“The weapons were provided to this company by arm smugglers,” it said, adding that they had been confiscated amid an investigation.

President Karzai has ordered that all 52 private security companies operating in the country disband by the end of the year, sparking fears of a security crisis as they are contracted by most foreign entities and the military.

In a meeting with visiting German Parliament Speaker Norbert Lammert, Karzai said there was a “serious need” to alter strategy against the Taleban and other groups linked to al-Qaeda, the presidential office said.

“There should be a review of the strategy in the fight against terrorism, because the experience of the last eight years showed that the fight in the villages of Afghanistan has been ineffective apart from causing civilian casualties,” Karzai was quoted as saying in a news release.

Karzai has in the past argued Afghan forces should take the lead in operations to root out insurgents and win support from deeply conservative villagers who harbor a long tradition of suspicion of outsiders. He says personal contact between coalition forces and villagers only breeds resentment, although most Afghan police and soldiers are drawn from northern Uzbeks and Tajiks who are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Pashtuns who make up the core of Taleban support.

Last week, Karzai also criticized the US plan to begin withdrawing troops starting next July and said the fight against terrorism cannot succeed as long as the Taleban and their allies maintain safe havens in Pakistan.

Karzai’s comments contradict statements from coalition commanders that an increase in the total number of foreign forces to more than 140,000 has turned the momentum of recent Taleban advances.
In other operations, NATO said combined coalition and Afghan forces detained several suspected Taleban in Kandahar province, including regional commanders and bomb-makers, as well as insurgents involved in Saturday’s attacks on Forward Operating Base Salerno and Camp Chapman in Khost. Chapman was the scene of a suicide attack in December that killed seven CIA employees.