By MATTHEW PENNINGTON
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 27, 2006; 3:54 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Fighting in southern Afghanistan killed 22 suspected Taliban militants, officials said Wednesday, as NATO nations approved expanding the alliance's peacekeeping force into the region.
On Thursday, officials said a civilian helicopter crashed in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, killing all 16 people on board, including at least two American civilians.
Afghan army and US.-led coalition troops have recovered 12 bodies and were searching for four more in the difficult, mountainous terrain where the civilian Mi-8 helicopter crashed on Wednesday, Col. Tom Collins, a coalition spokesman told reporters.
The Russian-made civilian helicopter crashed about 25 miles northeast of Khost city.
Collins said there was no indication yet what caused the crash. He said those on board included at least two Americans. The Dutch military has said two of its personnel were also on board.
Meanwhile, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, said a Taliban insurgency in five provinces of southern Afghanistan is being fueled by international terrorist networks, foreign money and a porous border which the Pakistani government does not control.
"We face a Taliban movement which has apparently recovered and has to be answered by a series of measures, political and military, in cooperation with the Afghan government," he told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council in New York.
Taliban fighters have stepped up attacks this year, triggering the worst violence since the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001 for hosting Osama bin Laden. The bloodshed has raised new fears for Afghanistan's fragile democracy.
The latest clashes, involving Afghan and U.S.-led coalition troops and air power, occurred Tuesday and Wednesday in two districts of Helmand province, also the hub of Afghanistan's huge trade in opium and heroin.
Militants attacked a coalition patrol with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Garmser district Tuesday but suffered seven dead, a coalition statement said.
Another five militants were killed and 11 were wounded Wednesday when they battled 200 Afghan police in Garmser, district police chief Ghulan Rasool said.
In Musa Qala district on Tuesday night, 10 militants were killed and 15 wounded by coalition and Afghan forces backed by airstrikes, said Ghulam Nabi Nalakhail, Helmand's chief of police.
No security forces were hurt in the violence, officials said.
The increase in violence comes as about 8,000 NATO forces _ mostly British, Canadian and Dutch _ deploy in the south as part of an alliance expansion. NATO also has troops in Kabul and northern and western Afghanistan.
In Brussels, Belgium, NATO nations formally approved the move into the southern provinces. The alliance's top military commander, U.S. Gen. James L. Jones, will begin taking command of the region from U.S.-led coalition troops this month, officials said.
Francesc Vendrell, special European Union representative for Afghanistan, said there would be 18,000 NATO troops nationwide along with a similar number of U.S. forces _ the biggest foreign military presence in the post-Taliban period.
With NATO bolstering its presence, the United States is expected to withdraw several thousand troops.
"We are not going to tolerate any haven for terrorist elements in Afghanistan," Vendrell said in Kabul. "We will stay as long as it takes to get this issue solved."
However, Vendrell said the NATO mission to pacify and rebuild the region would have been easier had troops deployed three or four years earlier _ before the Taliban regrouped and local disenchantment set in over official corruption and continuing poverty.
He also said the U.S.-led war on terrorism launched in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks had focused too much on al-Qaida.
"I think perhaps they were too single-minded on one objective without seeing the broader picture, perhaps not realizing that it was not simply a matter of al-Qaida that had produced the Taliban," he said.
In addition to military action, Vendrell said stabilizing the south required efforts to improve governance and development. Corrupt police and government officials are involved in the region's booming drugs trade.
Western officials say militants in the south are a loose alliance of hardcore Taliban, drug gangs and ethnic Pashtun villagers paid to fight Afghan and foreign forces. Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world's opium, and much of it is grown and processed into heroin in southern provinces.
In the weeks preceding the coalition's handover to NATO, more than 10,000 U.S.-led troops have fanned out across southern Afghanistan, killing more than 600 suspected Taliban militants since June 10, according to the coalition.
At least 19 coalition soldiers also have been killed in the same period, according to an Associated Press count based on coalition information.
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Associated Press reporters Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul, Noor Khan in Kandahar and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.