By Ismail Sameem
MONARAI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - NATO and Afghan forcesheld mopping up operations, hunting Taliban fighters andburying the dead on Friday, after an air and ground offensiverouted hundreds of insurgents from a valley near Kandahar city.
The allies mounted the offensive on Wednesday after theTaliban took control of the Arghandab valley, 20 kms (12 miles)northwest of Kandahar.
Around 600 militants, including some who had escaped a weekago during a mass jail break from a prison in the city, hadtaken up positions in a cluster of villages, according to aprovincial official and a Taliban spokesman.
On Friday, the governor of Kandahar province took a groupof journalists to the battle zone after 800 Afghan troops,backed by hundreds of, mainly Canadian, NATO soldiers hadwrested back control of the district.
They saw the havoc wreaked by shelling on the small mudwalled forts that are familiar sights in the Pashtun triballands of the region.
In the village of Monarai, the corpses of eight fighterslay under the shade of mulberry trees on the banks of a stream,while a dozen more were piled on top of one another a fewmetres (yards) away.
"We would like to ask you to bury them," GovernorAssadullah Khalid told a group of haggard village elders.
Blood-stained sandals and shoes were scattered nearby amongbroken branches on one scorched patch of earth.
The governor estimated more than 100 Taliban fighters werekilled in the onslaught, and said the bodies of many more hadbeen dumped in a ditch elsewhere.
There was no sound of fighting, and few of the severalthousand families who had fled earlier this week had begun toreturn to their homes in a valley known locally for the qualityof its grapes, pomegranates and hashish.
Soldiers warned journalists to watch out for land minesplanted by the insurgents.
SKIRMISHES
Earlier this week, a Taliban spokesman had said themilitants' aim was to retake the city that was the birthplaceof their movement.
A NATO spokesman in Kabul spoke of several skirmishesduring the fighting in Arghandab, but no large scale encounterswith Taliban forces.
"When Afghan and ISAF units moved into the area, theyencountered only minor incidents with insurgents and never metor spotted the large numbers of insurgents as claimed,"Brigadier General Carlos Branco said.
"There were some air attacks too, but not heavy."
In the past, Taliban fighters have seized control ofvillages overnight, only to melt away when the NATO andgovernment forces appeared. A gathering of such a large forcewas atypical of the guerrillas' tactics.
They have most commonly resorted to suicide attacks androadside bombs to harry NATO and government forces.
The Taliban's commando-style raid on Kandahar jail tospring hundreds of captured comrades last week was a shift intactics that caught the government and NATO by surprise.
While the mopping up continued in Arghandab on Friday, asuicide bomber attacked a foreign military convoy in Helmand,the province to the west of Kandahar, killing a soldier, anAfghan interpreter and five civilians.
The insurgency has gone through its bloodiest phase in thelast two years, as the Taliban regrouped after being drivenfrom power by U.S.-led forces in 2001, and mounting casualtieshave made some NATO member states hesitant to deploy troops.
The United States and NATO have more than 60,000 soldiersin Afghanistan, fighting alongside 150,000 Afghan troops, andthere is growing impatience with Pakistan over Taliban fightersusing its territory as a safe refuge.
(Writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by SimonCameron-Moore and Valerie Lee)
