The Pakistani army said gunmen in the cars opened fire on troops and threw grenades at them, killing one soldier.An official statement said "a few females and young members" were killed in the battle but one unnamed military source told reporters yesterday that of the dead, 15 were women and children and only two men.The Pakistani army said the militants had used women and children as human shields, and that some women had joined in the fighting. While across the border in Pakistan, at least 17 people were killed in a gun battle between Pakistani soldiers and militants, among them women and children.The fighting broke out after militants tried to flee in two cars when Pakistani soldiers began searching a compound near Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan. Abdul Latif Hakimi, a Taliban spokesman, said he was killed because he was an American spy.The Afghan army and US-led forces said they had killed 20 Taliban insurgents and Islamic militants in Khost province yesterday. A vital ally of President Karzai in the battle against the resurgent Taliban, he was abducted along with his two sons, a brother and two nephews from his home on Friday.His relatives were released unharmed but Agha Jan's body was later found. The murder of Malik Agha Jan, a prominent tribal chief in Zabol province, in the southern Afghanistan Pashtun heartlands, is the latest in a series of killings of prominent Karzai supporters by resurgent Taliban forces. In recent days, fighting has flared on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with US, Afghan and Pakistani forces claiming they have killed as many as 60 Taliban insurgents and their Islamic militant allies over the past four days.Women and children were also killed alongside militants in a Pakistani army operation at the weekend in the tribal area of North Waziristan, just across the border from Afghanistan.The murder of Agha Jan is a sign of how far the situation has deteriorated in in recent months and how emboldened the Taliban have become. The Kurds, suspicious of the Shia parties, would also have preferred Mr Allawi to stay in power.Hersh quotes a UN official as saying: "The American embassy's aim was to make sure that Allawi remained as prime minister, and they tried to do it through manipulation of the system ... [But] the Shias rigged the election in the south as much as ballots were rigged for Allawi."Mr Allawi clearly had money to spend during the election and it was assumed, though without any proof in Iraq, that this ultimately came from the US..

A tribal leader and ally of President Hamid Karzai has been kidnapped and hanged by the Taliban as violence in Afghanistan continues to intensify in the approach to elections planned for September. In conflict with the Sunni Arabs, Washington could not afford also to alienate the Shias or their religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The Shia leaders wanted an election because their community, long politically marginalised in Iraq, makes up 60 per cent of the population.But since the Gulf War in 1991 the US had been worried about allowing Shia parties or parties friendly with Iran to take power. This was a prime reason why the US did not overthrow Saddam Hussein after defeating his army in Kuwait.Washington was happy with its choice of Iyad Allawi, a secular Shia businessman whose Iraqi National Accord group had long been supported by the CIA, as interim prime minister. It wanted him to do well enough in the election to stay as prime minister. This was after the President had been frustrated in his support for a CIA operation to fund political candidates anywhere in the world who were seeking to spread democracy. In practice, this would have allowed the CIA to give financial aid to the candidacy of Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, appointed by the US in June 2004.

The plan was dropped because of the opposition of Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader.The US was compelled to agree to an open election in Iraq after it became apparent in the autumn of 2003 that direct rule by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq, had provoked a vicious and rising guerrilla war. Seymour Hersh, the American investigative journalist, said the White House secretly tried to influence the elections by undertaking operations "off the books". All were members of the 1st Battalion Staffordshire Regiment.. President George Bush authorised covert intervention in Iraq's January elections by using behind-the-scenes operatives in an effort to engineer an Iraqi government allied to the US and not dominated by Shia parties, claims an article in The New Yorker today. * The three British soldiers killed by a roadside bomb in Amarah on Saturday were named yesterday as Second Lieutenant Richard Shearer, 26, from Nuneaton; Private Leon Spicer, 26, from Tamworth in Staffordshire; and Private Phillip Hewett, 21, also from Tamworth. A single incident of danger is easier to endure than relentless attack and the knowledge that the bombers were here yesterday and tomorrow they will return again.