NATO forces killed in Afghanistan

Two US-led service members have been killed in southern Afghanistan on New Year's Day as 2010 was marked as the bloodiest year in the nine-year-old invasion of the country.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) said Saturday that one of its service members was killed in southern Afghanistan in an insurgent attack, the Associated Press reported on Sunday. 

The NATO statement did not provide additional details on the second death of a NATO service member in the war-torn country this year. 

Meanwhile, a British soldier was killed in an explosion in Helmand province on Sunday. Nearly 350 British troops have been killed in Afghanistan since the start of the US-led invasion in 2001. 

Southern Afghanistan is the site of some of the fiercest fighting between NATO and the Taliban. In 2010, NATO deaths in Afghanistan hit a record high of 711. 

According to official figures, more than 2,200 US-led soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the outset of their occupation of the country. 

Figures released by Afghanistan's Baakhtar News Agency, however, put the foreign troop death toll at nearly 4,500. 

Despite the presence of some 150,000 US-led foreign troops in Afghanistan, the country remains devastated by militancy as well as persistent bombings and ground attacks by foreign troops that supposedly target militants but leave many civilian casualties. 

The climbing military casualties come with a comparable rise in Afghan civilian death toll. The latest report on Afghan civilian deaths from the United Nations shows a 20 percent rise in the first 10 months of 2010. 

The report said that deaths from Taliban attacks in the period were up about 25 percent, and that the Taliban were responsible for the majority of the 2,412 civilian deaths reported in the period. 

RZS/MB