Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters

KABUL, 5 June 2004 — US and Afghan forces killed 17 Taleban guerrillas in clashes in a restive region of southern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday. Three US soldiers and some Afghan fighters were also wounded in the clashes, part of a joint US and Afghan operation backed by US airstrikes in the Miya Neshin district of Kandahar province on Thursday, they said.

“Coalition forces are reporting that three US soldiers received minor wounds in this contact and returned to duty. We have also confirmed 17 enemy KIAs (killed in action),” the US military said in an e-mail response to Reuters questions. “This contact was a joint operation and involved coalition ground and aerial support,” it said.

Taleban officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The casualty toll would be one of the worst suffered by the group in a single day in the past year.

The US casualties come less than a week after four American soldiers from the US-led foreign force of nearly 20,000 in Afghanistan were killed when their car was hit by an explosion in Zabul, neighboring Kandahar. Kandahar military commander Gen. Khan Mohammad said troops from neighboring Uruzgan province had also taken part.

Six aid organizations have decided to suspend operations in the northwestern Afghan province of Badghis for a period of four weeks following the killing Wednesday of five workers from Medecins sans Frontieres, it was revealed yesterday.

The decision, taken following joint talks, was due to a combination of solidarity with MSF and “also for security reasons,” said a statement from German aid organization HELP. The five — a Belgian, a Norwegian, a Dutch national and two Afghans — were killed by an ambush in Badghis. MSF on Thursday announced a countrywide suspension of activities in order to review its position in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, US and Taleban officials met secretly in Frankfurt almost a year before the Sept. 11 attacks to discuss terms for the Afghans to hand over Osama Bin Laden, according to a German television documentary. But no agreement was reached and no further negotiations took place before the suicide hijackings in 2001, which Bin Laden subsequently hailed in a videotape as the work of his Al-Qaeda network.

ZDF television quoted Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan-American businessman, as saying he tried to broker a deal between the Americans and the Taleban rulers of Afghanistan, who were sheltering Bin Laden.

He quoted the Taleban foreign minister, Mulla Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, as saying: “You can have him whenever the Americans are ready. Name us a country and we will extradite him.”