KABUL • Two Nato soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed in a roadside bomb blast yesterday , as officials said 22 other people including three civilians were killed in separate attacks.
The violence was the latest in an upsurge blamed on the Islamist Taleban, which has intensified its insurgency against foreign and government forces since being ousted from power in late 2001.
The blast that killed the Nato troops in eastern Afghanistan close to the Pakistani border brought to 11 the number of international soldiers slain in Afghanistan in the past week.
"Two Isaf soldiers were killed in an IED (improvised explosive device) attack. One soldier was wounded," International Security Assistance Force spokeswoman Major Christine Nelson-Chung told AFP.
She refused to give further details, including the nationality of the casualties or the location of the blast.
But the deputy provincial police chief of the province of Paktika, Farooq Sangari, told AFP the blast struck a Nato vehicle in Bermal district and that an Afghan interpreter was also killed. The attack came three days after six Nato troops and two Afghan soldiers were slain in an ambush in northeastern Afghanistan.
One of the six troopers killed was the nephew of New Zealand Defence Minister Phil Goff serving in the US Army in Afghanistan, Goff said yesterday. US-born Lieutenant Matthew Ferrara, 24, was the son of Goff's sister Linda and held dual New Zealand and US citizenship, Goff said.
Ferrara became the first New Zealander killed in a military role in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the US-led coalition said three civilians and 15 militants died in a raid on a compound in the Garmser district of Afghanistan's troubled southern Helmand province on Sunday.
The troops went to the compound after intelligence reports indicated that Taleban-linked bombmakers and other extremist allies were hiding there. "Several militants barricaded themselves in a building on the compound and engaged coalition forces," the statement said.
"Coalition forces used a single grenade which killed the attacking militants; however, the building the militants were fighting from collapsed."
The bodies of a woman and two children, along with those of several militants, were found in a search of the building.
In a separate incident overnight, the militants attacked a security post a short distance from the provincial governor's office in Ghazni, police said. "Four policemen were martyred and two others were wounded in the attack last night,” deputy provincial police chief Mohammad Zaman told AFP.
