Six Afghan police and a soldier were killed and eight NATO troops injured in three separate attacks by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, officials and the military said on Friday.
The attacks which occurred in Herat in the west and Laghman in the east also left three Afghan police and four soldiers injured, they said.
The six policemen, including a district police chief, were killed when rebels ambushed a police convoy in Herat province on Thursday.
Mohammad Sediq, police chief of Adraskan district, was visiting police posts in the area when he was attacked, the province's police chief, Nisar Ahmad Paikar, told AFP.
Paikar blamed the attack on remnants of Taliban who have waged an insurgency since 2001 when they were forced out of power by US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Major Luke Knittig said seven ISAF soldiers were injured on Friday when their convoy was hit by a rocket fired by Taliban in Laghman province.
We had "two incidents in the last two days in Laghman province. Eight ISAF were soldiers wounded, one yesterday, seven today. An IASF convoy was hit by rocket propelled grenade," he told AFP.
The Afghan soldier was killed in Thursday's attack when armed rebels attacked a joint patrol of Afghan and NATO forces in Dawlat Shah district, Laghman provincial governor Gulab Mangal told AFP. He also blamed the attack on Taliban.
In another incident, US-led coalition troops raided a Taliban cell in remote eastern Nuristan province near the Pakistan border on Wednesday, killing four insurgents and arresting two, provincial police chief Abdul Ghani said.
There are about 8,000 coalition soldiers with a separate 31,000-strong NATO-led force trying to bring stability to the volatile country.
The almost daily violence in Afghanistan is also blamed on the Al-Qaeda network and a radical faction led by fugitive ex-prime minister and fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
NATO said on Thursday that Taliban bomb and suicide attacks had killed more than 700 Afghan civilians this year, with schools increasingly a target.
Around 2,000 rebels are also believed to have been killed, including 1,000 in a major anti-Taliban offensive focused on Kandahar province's Panjwayi district in September.