The troops Tuesday kicked off what NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) called their biggest offensive yet against the Taleban and their allies, focused on the lawless northern part of Helmand province.

Coalition war planes struck Taleban compounds and armouries and dropped “precision-guided munitions” on a Taleban militant who had been helping move anti-aircraft weapons, military statements said.

Two British soldiers and an unknown number of rebel fighters have died in various clashes.

Dadullah, who is reported to be the Taleban’s military operations chief for southern Afghanistan, acknowledged the superior might of ISAF in a telephone interview Saturday with AFP but said he was undaunted.

“No one in the world has better weapons than NATO. They have got better weapons, but we will defeat them with the power of faith and belief,” Dadullah told an AFP reporter who has spoken to him several times and knew his voice.

“The entire nation is with us: the people give us food, fruit and money. The people are fed up with infidel, invading troops and their puppets,” he said.

He claimed to be in Helmand province.

“We have enough men to fight this battle,” he said. “Some foreign mujahedin (holy fighters) are also fighting alongside our mujahedin.

Dadullah said Taleban fighters were being backed by Al Qaeda-linked foreign jihadists, including from Chechnya and the Palestinian territories.

“We have relations with Iraqi mujahedin—we send fighters to them, they send to us,” he added.

The coalition’s Operation Achilles snatched the initiative from the rebels’ much-anticipated “spring offensive,” a spokesman told reporters.

Last year was the bloodiest yet since the Taleban was ousted from power in Afghanistan in late 2001 in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States.

Helmand is one of the biggest headaches for the US-backed Afghan government as it struggles to establish its authority five years on.

The province produces most of Afghanistan’s opium, a three-billion-dollar a year trade that is funding the insurgency and encouraging the corruption that undermines the government.

ISAF spokesman Colonel Tom Collins acknowledged there were foreign fighters “in the hundreds” in southern Afghanistan.

The hardcore, ideologically-inspired Taleban in Helmand, for their part, numbered in the “high hundreds,” he said. The intention is to separate them from what ISAF calls hired ”soldiers-for-a-day.”

Some of the 5,500 Afghan, British, Canadian, Dutch and US troops mobilised for Operation Achilles were moving out from Kajaki, the site of a potentially powerful hydropower dam, Collins said.