The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Kabul

Four soldiers serving in the US-led coalition in Afghanistan were killed when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb Wednesday in the east of the country, the force said.

An Afghan national was also killed by the improvised device in the province of Paktia, which came as US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was in Afghanistan for talks with President Hamid Karzai.

The nationality of the soldiers was not given, but most of the troops who are deployed in that part of the country are US.

"Four coalition service members and one Afghan national were killed in an IED (improvised explosive device) strike in eastern Afghanistan this morning," the force said in a statement.

A coalition military spokesman contacted by AFP was unable to give details of the Afghan national.

The spokesman said a roadside bomb struck the military vehicle.

It was not immediately confirmed who was behind the bomb blast but Taliban militants waging an increasingly bloody insurgency have been using improvised bombs against foreign troops based here.

With the latest deaths, a total of 210 international soldiers have now been killed in insurgency-related unrest in Afghanistan this year alone, according to AFP tally. Around 220 died last year.

Gates was in Kabul to meet Karzai on how to tackle the growing unrest. The top US commander in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, said Tuesday that he needed more than 10,000 extra troops to fight the insurgency.

The hardline Islamic Taliban, who were ousted from power in late 2001 in a US-led invasion, are trying to topple the Western-backed Kabul government and force out the tens of thousands of international troops supporting it.

Their insurgency includes suicide attacks, roadside bombings and attacks on Afghan and foreign military targets, and is at its worst in the south and east of Afghanistan.

In a separate statement, the US-led coalition said it killed two militants in an operation Tuesday in the central province of Ghazni.

Elsewhere in Ghazni, two other militants were killed in a separate raid by Afghan security forces the same day, the defence ministry in Kabul said, while about two dozen other suspected rebels were captured.

An Afghan army soldier was also killed in a clash Tuesday with militants in Wardak, another restive province just south of Kabul.

There are about 70,000 international soldiers in Afghanistan. Most operate under the command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force but there is also a separate US-led coalition.