The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Kandahar

Four Afghan police and 30 Taliban rebels have been killed in a wave of violence in insurgency-hit Afghanistan in recent days, officials said Wednesday.

The policemen died Tuesday when their vehicle was blown up while on patrol in central Ghazni province, an official said.

"We believe it was the work of the Taliban. Four policemen were martyred," Ismail Jahangir, a spokesman for the local government, told AFP.

The same day, a dozen rebels including two militant commanders were captured in an operation by Afghan security forces and international troops elsewhere in Ghazni, Jahangir said.

In southern Helmand province, coalition and Afghan troops killed 18 rebels and wounded several others in an operation Tuesday, provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said.

"We killed 18 Taliban. They left the dead bodies behind," he said.

On Monday a dozen other suspected Taliban militants were killed in operations by Afghan and US-led forces in Sangin district of Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban militancy, the coalition reported Wednesday.

There was no independent verification of the toll.

Separately, a suicide bomber blew himself up late Tuesday near a convoy of international forces also in Helmand, killing no one but himself, Andiwal said, adding that three local passers-by were slightly injured.

The Taliban, ousted from power in a US-led invasion in late 2001, are trying to topple the US-backed Afghan government in an insurgency which has intensified in the past two years.

There are about 70,000 international forces deployed under NATO and a separate US-led coalition in Afghanistan in an effort to help local forces repel the Islamic rebels.