The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Kabul

Three US-led soldiers and an Afghan working with them were killed in a bomb blast in Afghanistan on Tuesday as government officials said about 40 rebels, some of them foreigners, died in air strikes.

The fresh bloodshed comes as US President George W. Bush announced 4,500 extra troops for Afghanistan's fight against a rising tide of extremism, and the Afghan and Pakistan leaders pledged to stand together against terrorism.

The soldiers were killed in the east of Afghanistan by an improvised explosive device (IED) of the type regularly used by Taliban and other extremist insurgents.

The US-led coalition did not give the nationalities of the troops but most international soldiers in the east are US nationals.

"Three coalition service members and one local-national contractor were killed today during an IED attack in eastern Afghanistan," it said in a statement that gave no further details.

The new deaths take to 201 the number of international soldiers to die in Afghanistan this year, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.

An Afghan soldier was killed separately by a remote-controlled bomb that had been fixed to a bicycle in the southern city of Kandahar, defence ministry spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP.

No one claimed the blast but it was similar to those carried out in the past by Taliban insurgents, who carried out a double suicide bombing in the city's police headquarters Sunday, killing at least five people.

In the southern province of Uruzgan meanwhile, troops were tipped off about a Taliban gathering on the outskirts of the town of Tirin Kot and sent in a strike early Tuesday, provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat said.

"The coalition forces bombed them and killed 16 Taliban and wounded another nine," Himat said.