KABUL, April 3 (Reuters) - NATO-led forces in Afghanistan bombed suspected insurgents near the southern city of Kandahar killing three people, an Afghan security official said on Thursday. Intermittent clashes have erupted this week as NATO leaders meet in Bucharest with the United States urging its NATO partners to send more troops to tackle a stubborn Taliban insurgency. A security official in Kandahar said an aircraft from the NATO-led force bombed the suspected insurgents on the outskirts of the city on Wednesday night. Three people had been killed but it was not clear who they were, he said. "It is still unclear if they were insurgents or militiamen," said intelligence official Amanullah Khan. A spokeswoman for the NATO-led force said she had no information about any such incident. Violence has surged in the past two years in Afghanistan, the bloodiest period since U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban government in 2001 after it refused to hand over al Qaeda leaders behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. French President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed at the NATO summit on Thursday that France would send a battalion of troops to the east of Afghanistan as part of efforts to bolster the alliance's 47,000-strong force. A NATO spokesman said that would enable the United States to redeploy forces to the south, in turn meeting Canada's conditions to keep troops in Afghanistan, where they have suffered heavy casualties at the hands of the Taliban. In a separate incident, members of a separate U.S.-led force killed several insurgents and detained four in the southern province of Helmand, the U.S. military said. The clash erupted during a search operation in the Kajaki district on Tuesday, where two British soldiers were killed in a bomb blast two days earlier. In the central province of Ghazni, south of Kabul, Taliban ambushed a U.S.-led patrol and one insurgent was killed and two members of the U.S.-led force wounded on Wednesday, an Afghan army spokesman said. (Reporting by Ismail Sameem; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Robert Birsel and Sanjeev Miglani)
French soldiers from NATO visit an Afghan police station before conducting a foot patrol in Kabul April 1, 2008. France may send a few hundred additional troops to Afghanistan to help ...
