GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Oct 15, 2007 (AFP) - Twelve NATO-led soldiers were wounded when their patrol came under attack from the Taliban outside Kabul in a fight that police said also left three civilians dead, officials said Monday.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) however denied civilians were killed in the incident in Jalriz district of central Wardak province on Sunday.

GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Oct 15, 2007 (AFP) - Three Afghan civilians were killed when international war planes bombed an area outside Kabul during a fierce battle with Taliban rebels, provincial police said Monday.

Five Taliban were also killed in Sunday's prolonged battle near Jalriz, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of Kabul, acting Wardak province police chief Mohammad Asif Banwal told AFP.

Seven other civilians were hurt, he said.

BAGHDAD, Oct 12, 2007 (AFP) - The US military said Friday that 15 women and children had been killed in an air strike and ground operation north of the Iraqi capital.

'Nineteen suspected insurgents and 15 women and children were killed in an operation Thursday in the Lake Tharthar region north of Baghdad,' a US military spokesman told AFP.

KABUL, Sept 23, 2007 (AFP) - The NATO-led force in Afghanistan said Sunday it was investigating whether four people killed in an air raid were Taliban or others, after police said the dead were Afghan security officers.

NATO forces launched an air raid in Kunar province on Saturday from gunship helicopters after a military base was attacked with rockets, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement on Sunday.

KABUL, Sept 5, 2007 (AFP) - Nearly 230 Afghan civilians have been killed and 650 wounded in Taliban-style suicide and other bomb explosions this year, security officials said here Wednesday.

About 12 percent of the casualties had occurred in the past two weeks, Major Charles Anthony, a spokesman with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, told reporters.

Insurgents often direct their bombings against the security services but the blasts generally kill more civilians.

ASADABAD, Afghanistan, Sept 2, 2007 (AFP) - Four Afghan civilians were killed and five wounded in a US-led force air raid that pounded Taliban insurgents in mountainous eastern Afghanistan, police said Sunday.

The incident was in the province of Kunar on Saturday, a day after about 10 civilians were killed when rockets fired by the Taliban at a US base landed on their homes.

The US-led coalition confirmed the military had dropped a precision-guided bomb on militants who had fired mortars on an outpost in the same area and at the same time.

GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Aug 22, 2007 (AFP) - Two shepherd boys were killed in the cross-fire as police clashed with Taliban rebels in southern Afghanistan, police said Wednesday.

The children, from a nomadic tribe, died in fighting in the southern Afghan province of Ghazni where Taliban militants have been holding 19 South Koreans hostage for more than a month.

'We're investigating to find out how those two kids were killed. We don't yet know if they were killed by police or enemy fire,' provincial police chief Alishah Ahmadzai told AFP.

KABUL, July 24, 2007 (AFP) - NATO-led troops shot dead a civilian driver Tuesday in southern Afghanistan after he failed to heed warnings to stop, a military statement said.

An International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) patrol tried to stop a vehicle matching the description of a suspected suicide car bomb, the force said, without giving details of the location.