NATO Announces Afghan Troop Deaths

U.S. soldiers inspect the scene of a suicide car bomb attack in Kandahar in May.

Intensified military operations against the Taliban are behind a surge in foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan, NATO said, as the alliance announced new fatalities.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said three more foreign soldiers had died in Taliban attacks -- two U.S. personnel killed in gunfights on June 27 and one from an unidentified nation in a bomb blast on June 26.

The deaths pushed the number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this month to at least 91, by far the deadliest monthly toll since the war began in late 2001.

However, an ISAF spokesman, Brigadier Josef Blotz, said the toll shows the alliance is taking the fight to the Taliban with the influx of thousands more U.S. troops into the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

compiled from agency reports