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By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 3, 2003; Page A15

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, April 2 -- Villagers responding to a call to jihad, or holy war, have joined suspected Taliban fighters in a battle against Afghan soldiers and U.S. Special Forces troops south of here, near the city of Spin Boldak, a spokesman for the provincial governor said today.

"The Taliban is taking advantage of the very simple, illiterate people and telling them this is jihad," said Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai. "Both are fighting."

About 600 of Gul Agha's provincial militiamen, supported by Special Forces soldiers, were still battling an unknown number of Taliban-led fighters tonight, Pashtoon said.

The conflict began when those fighters fired on a detachment of 12 Special Forces soldiers, who called in a barrage of air support, said a spokesman for the U.S. military at Bagram air base, north of the capital of Kabul.

The U.S. soldiers were observing an Afghan militia operation in the vicinity of Spin Boldak, about 70 miles southeast of here, when about 40 fighters believed to be Taliban fired on them, the spokesman said. U.S. forces responded with rockets and 30mm rounds.

The U.S. military said it had received no reports of U.S. or Afghan casualties by tonight and could offer no assessment "as to the results of the engagement on the enemy."

Pashtoon, however, claimed a rout. "The enemy has been sieged by our forces," he said. "We are cleansing these elements."

The fighting follows weeks of growing violence in Afghanistan's volatile south, the homeland of the hard-line Taliban rulers ousted by a U.S.-led coalition in late 2001.

A Red Cross worker was killed outside Kandahar on March 27, and two days later gunmen on motorcycles ambushed a military convoy in neighboring Helmand province, killing two U.S. soldiers. The deaths were the first for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since December.

A high-ranking Taliban leader asserted responsibility for the killings in a radio interview and, in widely distributed posters, the Taliban's elusive leader, Mohammad Omar, called for a holy war against Americans and Afghans who help them.

Rebels who oppose U.S. forces in Afghanistan have also waged less deadly efforts in recent days: planting a land mine that damaged a U.S. Humvee here, attacking provincial government employees and distributing leaflets warning Afghans to keep their children out of schools. Some of the pamphlets were issued by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, Pashtoon said.

"The last few weeks the situation in Kandahar was getting worse day by day," Pashtoon said. "The increase in violent incidents started five months ago, but became more common after [the start of] the Iraq war. We are not afraid of them. When we find them, we love to go fight them."

On Friday and Saturday, about 1,200 soldiers loyal to Gul Agha battled Taliban fighters north of Kandahar, Pashtoon said.

"When we deployed to the north we expected to engage 300 to 400 fighters," he said. "We found about 30 and arrested a dozen," he said. Among them was former Taliban interior minister Abdul Razaq.

In the fighting north and south of Kandahar, the forces battling Taliban fighters were composed "98 percent" of Gul Agha's men, backed by a small number of Special Forces, Pashtoon said.