US-led coalition and Afghan forces killed 25 suspected Taliban in Afghanistan's volatile south, while Canadian troops from a Nato-led security force narrowly escaped a suicide bombing near where four fellow soldiers died in militant attacks the previous day.
Meanwhile about a thousand South Korean Christians started their journeys home from Kabul under tight government security, after being ordered out of Afghanistan amid allegations they were trying to convert Muslims.
Acting on a tip from local tribal elders, police in the southern Helmand province raided an orchard where Taliban were camping and called in airstrikes, said provincial police chief Ghulam Nabi Malakhai.
The US-led coalition, tasked with tracking down al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, said 25 Taliban were killed in last night's raid. Nato took charge of security in the south this week from the coalition amid a barrage of violence that has left seven of its soldiers dead.
However, the coalition, which is not under Nato command, has retained its purview to conduct counterterrorism operations there. In the southern Kandahar province, a suicide attacker blew up his car in Maymand district, the governor said, as a nearby Nato patrol drove away undamaged.
The Canadian soldiers, believing they had been attacked by roadside bombs, kept moving and left the investigation to local authorities, said Canadian military spokesman Lt Navy Mark MacIntyre.
This was apparently the second suicide car attack targeting the Canadians in two days. Nato today said a blast the day before that killed 21 Afghans, including children, in a busy market in nearby Panjwayi was targeting one of its convoys. Five of the Canadians were slightly hurt, a statement said.
President Hamid Karzai today condemned the Panjwayi bombing as a "cowardly attack against our Muslim people," and expressed sorrow for the deaths of four Canadian soldiers killed yesterday by militants in elsewhere in Kandahar province. The lawlessness that has hit the south encroached on the capital Kabul last night, when 12 gunmen attacked a highway checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, local police said. Police killed one attacker.
Although a series of bomb blasts has recently rattled the city, attacks on security forces are rare. Also in Kabul, hundreds of Korean Christians boarded flights out of Afghanistan today, after the government ordered them to leave, accusing them of trying to convert Muslims.