KABUL (AFP) — Troops killed 60 militants and seized then destroyed their largest-ever drugs haul in a four-day operation that smashed an insurgent hub in turbulent southern Afghanistan, the military said Saturday.
The operation in Helmand province, where a British soldier was killed in a separate incident on Friday, ended overnight when precision air strikes obliterated 92 tonnes of drugs.
Masses of heroin-processing chemicals and bomb-making materials collected in the sweep of Marja, southwest of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, were also destroyed by the air strikes.
"A total of 60 militants were eliminated as they mounted an ineffective and uncoordinated defence against friendly forces," a joint US and Afghan military statement said, issuing a final tally for the whole operation.
The statement said the troops had "seized the single-largest drug cache by Afghan-led forces in Afghanistan to date".
Helmand, where thousands of British troops are based for a NATO-led military force helping Afghanistan, is the main producer of Afghan opium, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's supply.
Most of it is turned into heroin and smuggled to markets in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The vast province is also a stronghold for the Taliban, who were in government between 1996 and 2001 and are now waging an Al-Qaeda-linked insurgency.
The operation had confirmed that Marja was a "hub of multiple types of militant and criminal activity", the statement said.
"The four-day operation severely disrupted one of the key militant and criminal operations and narcotics hubs in southern Afghanistan," US military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said.
Afghan and international officials say the Taliban earn millions of dollars a year from the drugs trade.
In other insurgency-linked incidents reported Saturday, the British defence ministry said one of its soldiers was killed in Helmand's Sangin district when he was shot while on foot patrol Friday.
Another soldier in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force died on Friday in the southern province of Uruzgan when a helicopter made an emergency landing, ISAF said.
It did not give the troop's nationality and stressed the chopper was not brought down by insurgents.
The Afghan army said 20 militants were killed late Friday in an operation in the northwestern province of Badghis, which borders Turkmenistan.
An official in the central province of Ghazni said meanwhile that a Taliban rocket struck a civilian minivan Saturday, killing a woman and a man.
And bomb blasts in Ghazni and Nangarhar provinces in the east killed a policeman each, officials said.
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