Taliban overruns Afghan province

The death took to 138 the number of NWO soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, mostly in hostile action. Nearly 220 foreign soldiers died in violence last year.

Four police officers and four security guards escorting a convoy of civilian trucks carrying supplies for foreign troops were killed in separate attacks in southern Helmand and Zabul provinces, officials said.

Security forces launched a counterattack and killed 15 rebels, provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said, citing information from local residents who saw the bodies on the site near the Helmand capital Lashkar Gah.

"Villagers reported to us that they saw 15 Taliban bodies," he said. The claim could not be independently verified.

About 20 other Taliban rebels were killed overnight when international helicopters attacked them in the eastern province of Khost, local government spokesman Khaibar Pashtun told AFP.

The choppers were called in after the rebels ambushed a police convoy, killing a policeman, Pashtun said.

Elsewhere in Khost, an Afghan driver was killed when militants attacked a convoy supplying a foreign military base there, a police official said.

The NATO-led military force in Afghanistan announced late Sunday that one of its troopers had been killed in the same province.

A dozen civilians were meanwhile wounded when NATO-led troops pounded Taliban positions near a residential area in the eastern province of Kunar, provincial governor Abdul Jalal Jalal told AFP.