To the north, insurgents attacked German soldiers and Afghan national police with grenades and gunfire as the troops drove through an area northwest of Kunduz city, wounding two Afghan police officers. Air support was called in and the insurgents fled, the German military said in a statement.
A suicide bomber also struck the same province, which has seen a spike in militant attacks in recent months.
The bomber, who was targeting a police convoy, killed five civilians, including three children, the Interior Ministry said. Five other people were wounded in the attack, which missed the convoy, it said.
Separately, three Afghan soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand province, in the Musa Qala district, the Defense Ministry said. It did not give further details.
The violence has continued unabated despite the tens of thousands of foreign troops already in the country since the 2001 US-led invasion.
President Obama convened his war council again yesterday to fine-tune a strategy to respond to the intransigent violence.
Obama is considering sending tens of thousands more soldiers to fight an increasingly virulent insurgency, and pressure has been mounting for action. He is expected to announce a decision in the next few weeks.
NATO is also calling on allied nations to add to their military presence. NATO has about 71,000 troops in Afghanistan, nearly half of them American. The US military also has another 36,000 troops in Afghanistan who serve outside NATO under independent command.
General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has said more US forces are needed to head off a failure against Taliban militants. He has recommended about 40,000 additional troops.
An alliance spokesman in Brussels, James Appathurai, said yesterday that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is negotiating for more troops, equipment, funding, and other resources for the newly established NATO Training Mission, which is tasked with building up Afghanistan’s nascent army and police force.
