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Source: Reuters -
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More than 25 NATO and Afghan troops were wounded during a search on Friday for two missing US paratroopers in western Afghanistan, the NATO-led force says.
The Taliban says the two missing soldiers are dead and it has recovered their bodies.
A statement by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan says more than 25 troops were wounded during a search and rescue mission.
Lieutenant Darin Russell, a spokesman for NATO forces, says the troops were wounded "by insurgent activity".
He has declined to give further details of the incident, which is now under investigation.
He didn't say how many of the wounded were NATO troops and how many were Afghans, or whether any of them had been killed.
The chief of police in Badghis province in western Afghanistan, Abdul Jabar, says NATO aircraft had struck their own troops during the search and that several Americans had died in the "friendly fire" air strike.
NATO announced on Friday that two US paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division had gone missing on Wednesday while delivering supplies.
Reports of missing troops in Afghanistan are extremely rare and would automatically trigger a large-scale military response.
A Taliban spokesman, Qare Yousuf, says the two missing soldiers drowned and the Islamist militants have recovered their bodies.
Jabar also says the two missing US soldiers drowned.
US Navy Captain Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the NATO-led force, says: "We continue exhaustive search and rescue operations to locate our missing service members. We are doing everything we can to find them."
"The families of these service members have been notified about their loved ones' status, and we will continue to keep them informed as information becomes available."
Troops from more than 40 nations are members of the nearly 110,000-strong force, two-thirds of them American.
Badghis is one of several provinces in the previously quiet west and north of Afghanistan, where insurgent activity has increased dramatically in recent months.
A US soldier has been missing in the southeast since late June.
Insurgents say they are holding him, and US forces in the area launched a massive manhunt.
