UK, US start new year with casualties in Afghanistan

KABUL: Four US troops and a British soldier have been killed in Afghanistan, officials said yesterday, the first reported fatalities of 2010 after a record number of foreign deaths in the conflict last year.

Four American soldiers serving with NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) died in a roadside bomb blast in a southern Taliban hotspot on Sunday, the coalition said in a statement.

Their deaths follow the killing last week of seven American CIA agents in a suicide attack inside a military base and four Canadian soldiers and a journalist in a roadside bombing. Both attacks were claimed by the Taliban.