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Arghandab: Helicopter gunships and troops with small and heavy arms blasted a valley in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday as local and Nato forces launched a huge offensive against hundreds of Taliban insurgents, many of whom broke out of jail last week.
About 600 Taliban fighters on Monday took over villages in Arghandab, on the northern outskirts of Kandahar city, days after freeing hundreds of inmates in an attack on the city's main jail, according to the Taliban and an Afghan official.
Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf said militants had set their sights on Kandahar itself, the movement's birthplace, which lies about 20km from Arghandab.
Thousands of families have fled Arghandab since Monday, when Nato warned that an operation would be staged to flush out the Taliban from the district, said Agha Lalai, a member of Kandahar's provincial council and a tribal chief of Arghandab.
$13m engines missing
The US-led coalition in Afghanistan said yesterday that four US helicopter engines worth more than $13 million (Dh48 million) had gone missing while being transported by a Pakistani truck company.
"Four helicopter engines transported by a Pakistani truck company to Coalition Joint Task Force 101 went missing. The exact location is not determined yet," coalition spokesman Christian Patterson told AFP.
The engines went missing before the 101st Airborne took command of the coalition in Afghanistan on April 11, Patterson said.
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