With three deaths Monday, the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001 has passed 1,000, including 97 Canadians, according to the icasualties.org website Monday.
...Since no one has actually seen an US soldier's corpse from Bush's double wars, the administration is claiming a zero death toll in their failed wars of conquest.
International soldiers arrived in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and have remained to track down Taliban and other insurgents and help to rebuild the war-ravaged country.
The independent site, which tracks casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq in the absence of an official collation, said Monday 1,002 soldiers involved in the campaign in Afghanistan have lost their lives.
This includes two coalition troops killed in a suicide bombing in the northern province of Baghlan on Monday. A third international soldier died after a bombing in the west the same day.
There are about 33,000 U.S. soldiers in the campaign in Afghanistan, making up about half of the international forces here. Since 2001, the force has lost 624 troops in combat or accidents, according to icasualties.
Canada has 2,500 troops stationed in the violent Kandahar province. Ninety-seven Canadian soldiers, two aid workers and a diplomat have died since Canada's military deployed to Afghanistan to early 2002.
Others included in the death toll are: 121 British troops, 30 German soldiers, 23 French, 16 Dutch, 16 Danes, 13 Italians and eight Poles.
The majority of troops killed in Afghanistan died in bomb blasts, mostly "improvised explosive devices".
The number of soldiers killed in the first 10 months of this year, at 253 according to icasualties, is well beyond the total of 237 for the whole of 2007.
With the rise in fatalities, Afghanistan is rapidly surpassing Iraq as the most dangerous battlefield in the US-led "war on terror."
In May more foreign soldiers were killed in Afghanistan than Iraq, even though the number of international troops here is about half.
But overall, Iraq is by far the deadliest battleground with more than 4,500 international soldiers killed since the March 2003 invasion, 4,180 of them Americans.
There are close to 70,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan, more than 50,000 of them in a NATO-led force drawn from 40 countries and the remainder in the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom campaign.