About 40 Taliban guerrilla fighters have been killed and some 50 others arrested in separate joint operations by Afghan government troops and US-led coalition forces in southern provinces, Afghan officials said on Tuesday.

A joint operation by hundreds of Afghan soldiers with air and ground support of US forces was launched on Monday in Dai Chupan district of Zabul province, about 300 kilometers southwest of Kabul, said a provincial official.

"Some 40 Taliban fighter were killed yesterday evening in a joint operation by Afghan troops from four provinces backed by air and ground forces of the US-led coalition troops," Noor Ahmad, spokesman of the Zabul provincial governor, told Xinhua through telephone.

"US gunship helicopters heavily bombed the suspected Taliban bases in mountains, destroyed them and nothing is left there now,"he said.

"But some Taliban remnants are still in the area," he said, adding that the Taliban is still continuing their guerrilla fighting in the area.

He emphasized that the current joint operation will be going on until all the Taliban elements are eradicated from the area.

Monday's massive operation was a response to recently increasing Taliban insurgencies in the border province, which borders the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Some 300 Taliban fighters ambushed a truck of government troops in Zabul and attacked a district administrative office in neighboring Urozgan province last week, killing some eight government soldiers including a district security commander.

A US military spokesman said on Monday night that at least 14 Taliban fighters were killed in a separate joint operation in Kandahar province.

"This afternoon, Afghan militia forces and coalition special operations forces supported by A-10s, AV-8s and F-16s engaged anti-coalition forces in the Kandahar province, resulting in at least 14 enemy killed in action," spokesman of US-led coalition forces Colonel Rodney Davis said in a statement.

He said there were no reported casualties on the coalition side.

About 12,500 US-led coalition forces are in Afghanistan, mostly deployed in southern and eastern border areas across Pakistan, to hunt down remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda network.

Meanwhile, in another Afghan-US joint operation called Warrior Sweep, about 50 suspected Taliban fighters were arrested not long ago in the southeast border province of Paktika, an Afghan official said.

Many ammunitions including machine guns, Klashinkov rifles, rocket launchers and explosives were also seized in the operation,he added.

The operation, launched over one month ago in southeast Afghanistan, is the first major combat operation of the Afghan new national army backed by US coalition forces, US military spokesman Davis said earlier.

Remnants of the Taliban movement, which was driven out of power in Afghanistan after a US-led military strike in late 2001, have been stepping up their attacks against the US-backed government and US forces in recent months in southern and southeastern provinces.

(Xinhua News Agency August 26, 2003)