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 towards 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 Defence Ministry spokesman Thomas Raabe said in Berlin a NATO team training Afghan forces was travelling in an armoured 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 stabilise 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.
"It was a suicide car attack which killed two truck drivers and wounded 10 more of them, along with two (Afghan) army soldiers," said General Sher Mohammad Zazai in Kandahar.
Reuters pictures showed the front of one truck badly twisted and pock-marked by shrapnel, its windscreen blown out.
In neighbouring Uruzgan, Afghan security forces killed seven Taliban fighters, the local police chief said.
Afghan security officials also said four police and six Taliban fighters were killed during an attack on a funeral for a police commander in Helmand's Musa Qala, near the Helmand River.
Suicide attacks and roadside bomb blasts are the most common weapons used by the Taliban in their campaign to drive out almost 90,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan and to destabilise President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed government.
Washington is pouring in extra troops in part to ensure security for August 20 presidential elections, the second in Afghanistan's short history as a democracy.
Two U.S. soldiers were killed in an attack on a combat outpost in southeastern Paktika province on Saturday.
Three British soldiers were killed in roadside bomb blasts and a rocket grenade attack at the weekend in Helmand.
All three died in operations near Gereshk, Helmand's main industrial city in the Helmand River valley where the U.S. Marines launched their new offensive.
A major objective of the new offensive is to take ground from the Taliban and to hold it, something overstretched British-led NATO troops in Helmand have so far been unable to do.
There was also a spate of kidnappings at the weekend, another tactic commonly used by Taliban insurgents as well as criminal gangs seeking ransom payments.
(Additional reporting by Sayed Salahuddin and Golnar Motevalli in KABUL, Kamal Sadat in GARDEZ, Ismail Sameem in KANDAHAR and Saeed Ali Achakzai in CHAMAN, Pakistan; editing by Tim Pearce)
