Four US soldiers killed in Afghanistan

KABUL: Islamic militants killed four US soldiers in the restive southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, the US military said.

The soldiers, who were patrolling with Afghan troops on Monday, were killed when a bomb went off under their vehicle. The patrol then came under fire from the militants before US air support was called in.

Remnants of the ousted Taliban regime late Sunday ambushed two vehicles belonging to Afghan security forces, killing three of the security personnel and kidnapping five in the southern province of Helmand, senior police said on Monday.

A Taliban spokesman said they had killed all eight policemen. Only three bodies have been found so far.

In the eastern province of Kunar, border police arrested an Afghan trying to smuggle in nearly 700 remote controlled bombs in Sarkhani district along the Pakistan border, officials from the Afghan interior ministry said.

Currently, more than 19,000 US-led troops are hunting Taliban remnants and their allies from the Al Qaeda network, mainly in the south and east where the insurgents are most active.

The Afghan Interior Ministry Monday disclosed that hundreds of Al Qaeda-linked foreign nationals have received Afghan nationality during the past regime.

"Some 990 foreign nationals got Afghan identity cards and 770 of them are linked with the Al Qaeda terrorist network," ministry spokesman Yousif Stanikzai said.

He declined to disclose the countries of origin of those foreigners who had received Afghan identity cards.

Several thousand foreign nationals, mainly from Arab countries, entered Afghanistan and joined the anti-Soviet jihad or holy war in the early 1980s.

During the extremist Taliban regime that was toppled in late 2001, thousands of foreign nationals linked with the Al Qaeda network were based in different parts of the war-torn country.