KABUL, 26 August 2005 — US and Afghan troops backed by helicopter gunships and warplanes killed five suspected Taleban, the military said yesterday, bringing to 16 the number of rebels who have reportedly died in two days of clashes.

The deaths came during a series of joint operations across southern Afghanistan to boost security ahead of the country’s landmark parliamentary elections on Sept. 18, it said.

The statement added that the five guerrillas were killed on Wednesday in the Kandahar area, the birthplace of the Taleban, when US and Afghan troops located an “enemy observation post” and called in air support.

“With the combination of US A-10 aircraft, attack helicopters and direct fire weapons, five additional enemy were killed,” it said, adding that there were no US casualties. There was no independent confirmation of the deaths.

Earlier, Afghan officials reported the deaths of 11 alleged Taleban insurgents during two raids in southern Afghanistan’s restive provinces of Zabul and Uruzgan on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The US military yesterday confirmed an identical number of deaths during “Operation Vigilant Sentinel” on the same days.

It said five Taleban were killed and two were arrested early Wednesday 25 miles northeast of Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan province.

On Wednesday Uruzgan governor Jan Mohammed told AFP that a Taleban commander called Mullah Painday Mohammed was among the five dead and that a large cache of weapons and explosives had been seized.

A day earlier, a B-52 bomber and other aircraft were called in to attack militants 16 kilometers southeast of Tarin Kowt, the US military said.

Meanwhile the US said six insurgents were killed Tuesday after Afghan and US forces saw them placing homemade bombs near a road in the Shinkay district of Zabul province. Weapons and bombs were recovered, it added.

It was not clear if the incident was linked to provincial spokesman Gulab Shah Ali Khail’s disclosure on Wednesday that six Taleban were killed when joint forces surrounded a bomb factory in Sahak, a remote village in Zabul.

On Monday, the US military said at least 105 Taleban militants had been killed in the past three weeks in other pre-election battles. Sixty-five died in Zabul province and 40 in the eastern province of Kunar, it said.

Meanwhile, unidentified insurgents Wednesday torched a primary school for girls and boys in the Alingar district of the eastern province of Laghman, the latest in a series of attacks on Afghan educational institutions.

“The school was set ablaze and taking advantage of the night’s darkness the perpetrators managed to flee,” police spokesman Zalmay Khan said, without pinning the blame on any one group.

A string of similar incidents in southern and southeastern Afghanistan have been blamed on the Taleban, which banned girls from going to school while it was still in power.

Around 1,000 people have been killed in rebel-related violence in Afghanistan so far this year, compared with 850 in 2004.