Taliban fighters who were occupying villages near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar have been forced to retreat, Afghan defence officials claimed today.
General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry, said the country's army was now in control of the villages and had killed 56 militants. Earlier, Kandahar's governor said "hundreds" of Taliban were killed or wounded.
Nato gave a more cautious assessment of the situation and did not confirm the death toll. One spokesman said most of the Taliban forces had not fought back.
Officials said the villages were overrun on Monday, three days after Taliban fighters raided Kandahar's main prison and freed around 400 militants.
Yesterday morning, more than 1,000 Afghan and Canadian Nato forces responded with a major offensive that included air strikes, amid fears the Taliban was regaining power in its former stronghold. Yesterday, Afghan officials said 20 Taliban fighters had been killed.
Azimi said the fleeing militants had planted hundreds of land mines in the area before they left.
Kandahar's governor, Asadullah Khalid, told Reuters that the Taliban had been "cleared totally" from the villages.
"They have suffered hundreds of dead and wounded and many of their casualties are Pakistanis," he said.
A spokesman for Nato, Mark Laity, confirmed that air strikes had taken place but would only say that the mission was progressing "methodically and successfully".
"We don't have a definitive assessment, though casualties were inflicted," he said.
Another Nato spokesman, General Carlos Branco, told the AFP news agency that relatively little fighting had taken place.
"So far our assessment is that if the insurgents are there they have not the numbers and the foothold that they previously claimed and, obviously, they did choose not to fight," he said.
The only confirmed air strike took place when one helicopter fired in self-defence against "positively identified" militants, he added.
He said one civilian was confirmed as having been killed in the fighting, with seven other people injured, among them two Afghan soldiers and three civilians working for Nato troops.
The extent of the initial Taliban influx around Kandahar remains unclear amid a series of conflicting reports.
While locals said fighters had flooded into Arghandab, a district of farmhouses and vineyards north-west of Kandahar city, detonating bridges and planting mines, Nato said yesterday there was "no evidence" the Taliban controlled the area, putting some of the reports down to panic and exaggeration.
Nonetheless, the very public success of the Taliban in freeing its fighters from the jail has placed renewed pressure on Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, to demonstrate that the security situation is improving.
Violence has continued elsewhere in the country, including the death this week of four British soldiers in Helmand province, including the first female casualty in the conflict.