U.S.-Led Forces Kill 11 Taliban

U.S. warplanes supporting Afghan ground forces pummeled Taliban positions in southern Afghanistan, killing at least 11 rebels during three days of fighting, the military said Thursday.

The fighting in the mountains of Kandahar and Zabul provinces has been going on since the end of August, and more than 100 suspected Taliban have been killed, U.S. and Afghan officials said. Four American soldiers have died during fighting in recent weeks.

The fighting in Zabul and Kandahar is part of an operation dubbed "Mountain Viper" that has been going on for more than two weeks.

"Operation Mountain Viper continues to destroy the Taliban's ability to operate in the southern region of Afghanistan," the military said in a statement issued from Bagram Air Base, north of the capital, Kabul.

The U.S. military said it was inflicting heavy casualties on the rebels, but the ability of the militia to mount such stiff resistance over a sustained period has led to fears of a mounting security threat in Afghanistan, two years after the Taliban were ousted in a U.S.-led bombing campaign.

Over the weekend, Taliban militants in eastern Paktia province began threatening residents that they would cut the nose of any Afghan caught listening to music and of any man who shaves his beard.

While in power, the hardline militia banned music, forced men to grow their beards, and barred women from working and girls from going to school. The insurgents have grown increasingly bold in their threats to Afghans deemed to be in leagues with the coalition.

Last week, four Afghans working for a Danish charity were tied up and shot to death along the side of a road by suspected Taliban after having been warned several times to stop working with foreigners.

In other violence, insurgents fired seven rockets at a coalition base in Deh Rawood, in central Uruzgan province. Coalition forces fired 81 mm mortars and machine guns at the suspected launch point. There were no reported casualties and the military did not announce any arrests.

On Wednesday, suspected Taliban set off a bomb as a coalition convoy was traveling near the U.S. base in Kandahar, but there were no reported casualties, the military said in a statement from Bagram Air Base.

In the southeastern city of Ghazni late Wednesday, a bomb exploded outside the home of an Afghan security official, killing a policeman and wounding two others, a spokesman for the governor of Ghazni province, Ahmad Zia Massood, told The Associated Press.

The bomb was planted in a tin can "and it exploded when policemen…tried to move it," the spokesman said, adding that he believed Taliban insurgents and their al Qaeda allies were responsible for the blast.