25 insurgents killed in attack

KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents attacked a NATO and Afghan army outpost in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border and at least 25 of the militants were killed in the resulting fight, officials said Wednesday.

Troops at the combat outpost in Spera district of Khost province returned fire with mortars late Tuesday, killing 25 to 30 insurgents, NATO said in a statement. Initial reports found there were no civilian casualties, it said.

Gen. Raz Mohmmad Horya Khil, a senior commander of the Afghan army in the province, said 29 insurgents were killed. There were no casualties among NATO or Afghan troops, he said.

Horya Khil said the attack, coming from the Pakistani side of the border, was directed at the Mir Safar joint-NATO and Afghan army camp and lasted for more than two hours. Helicopters were called in to provide support.

On Wednesday, a NATO serviceman was killed by a homemade bomb in southern Afghanistan.

NATO provided no further details, but the Danish military announced in Copenhagen that the bomb blast killed a Danish soldier and seriously injured another. The two members of the Royal Life Guards were on foot patrol in Helmand province when the bomb went off, it said.

The death followed the crash of a NATO helicopter in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday that killed nine NATO troops in the worst coalition helicopter crash in Afghanistan in four years.

All nine troops killed in the crash were Americans, the Pentagon confirmed, adding no further detail on why the craft went down.

Meanwhile, a U.S. official in Washington confirmed reports that the CIA is running an all-Afghan paramilitary group in Afghanistan that has been hunting al-Qaida, Taliban and other militant targets for the agency.

A security professional in Kabul familiar with the operation said the 3,000-strong force was set up in 2002 to capture targets for CIA interrogation. A former U.S. intelligence official said members of the covert Afghan force are used for surveillance and long-range reconnaissance and some have trained at CIA facilities in the United States.

The sources spoke Wednesday on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

The force, called the Counterterrorist Pursuit Team, was described in a new book by Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars. The paramilitaries, designed after U.S. commando teams, operate in violence-racked provinces including Kandahar, Khost, Paktia and Paktika, as well as the capital, Kabul, the security professional said.

Woodward also reports the units conduct covert operations inside neighboring Pakistan’s lawless border areas as part of a campaign against al-Qaida and Taliban havens there. Pakistan does not permit U.S. special operations forces to enter the area except for limited training missions. The purported use of Afghan paramilitaries to carry out spying activities will likely inflame already frayed political relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Information for this article was contributed by Kimberly Dozier, Adam Goldman, Chris Brummitt, Kristin M. Hall, Eric Talmadge and Kathy McCarthy of The Associated Press.