The latest violence came as the top British general in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan said in a newspaper interview Tuesday that the ousted Islamist regime was being defeated.

Four militants were killed in a gunbattle with Afghan troops in eastern Paktia province’s Zurmat district on Monday, the ministry’s press office told AFP. Three other rebels were captured, it said.

Paktia’s governor Hakim Taniwal was killed in a suicide bombing on Sunday. Six people attending his funeral were killed in another suicide blast the next day in neighboring Khost province.

Also on Monday, two insurgents were killed in a firefight in Paktika province on the Pakistani border, the ministry said, adding the rebels initiated the attack while troops were searching for rebels in the area.

Ten suspected insurgents were also captured Monday in Logar province, just south of Kabul, it said. “A large number of weapons, explosives and other bomb-making devices were also seized with the men,” the ministry said.

Separately, Afghan and US-led coalition forces detained a known commander of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami militant group, who was also a “known Al-Qaeda facilitator”, and six associates, a coalition statement said.

The arrests on Monday were made at a compound near Hafezan in eastern Nangarhar province after intelligence “indicated the suspects were involved in anti-government and anti-coalition activities.”

It said they surrendered peacefully from the compound, where several women and children were also found, and a large number of documents were confiscated.

Meanwhile six militants were wounded after attacking a police unit in Ghazni province, the ministry said. Another man was seized while laying a mine on a road used by Afghan and foreign troops, it added.

The Taleban were ousted by US-led forces weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States but have dramatically stepped up their insurgency this year in south and east Afghanistan.

NATO forces say a major operation in southern Kandahar province, the birthplace of the Taleban, has killed over 500 rebels since September 2. The Taleban rejects the figure.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) made further territorial gains Tuesday and the operation is continuing, ISAF spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nick Grant-Thorold told AFP.

ISAF chief Lieutentant General David Richards told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that his forces were winning.

“I believe that we are in the process of establishing psychological ascendancy,” Richards said in the interview published Tuesday.

A US soldier meanwhile was killed and another injured when their Humvee armoured vehicle overturned during combat operations in Asadabad, the capital of restive eastern Kunar province, the coalition said.