This ain't good.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26281580

SUROBI, Afghanistan - Insurgents ambushed a group of French parachutists outside Kabul, sparking a battle that killed 10 of the soldiers in the biggest loss of life for international forces in combat in Afghanistan in more than three years, officials said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a team of suicide bombers tried unsuccessfully to storm a U.S. military base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in a daring attack on a major American installation.

The French soldiers from the 8th infantry parachute regiment were on a reconnaissance mission in the Surobi district, an area known as a militant redoubt about 30 miles east of the Afghan capital.

Qazi Suliman, the district chief in Surobi, said the ambush sparked a three-hour gunbattle. French president Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed that 10 were killed and 21 wounded in the clashes.

An Afghan official said that four of those soldiers had been kidnapped by insurgents and killed. 1The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't supposed to release the information.

Suliman said he had a report that 13 militants were killed.

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Khost attacks
In the attack on the U.S. base just a few miles from the border with Pakistan, militants failed to gain entry to Camp Salerno in Khost city after launching waves of attacks just before midnight on Monday, said Arsallah Jamal, the governor of Khost.

The attacks came a day after a suicide bomb outside the same base killed 10 civilians and wounded 13 others.

*
Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, said Afghan soldiers, aided by U.S. troops, chased and surrounded a group of insurgents, and that six militants blew themselves up when cornered. Seven other militants died in those explosions and a rolling gun battle,2 he said.

"(The Afghan National Army) is saying that anytime we get close to them, they detonate themselves," Jamal said.

Comments
1. AQ's new manual suggests taking hostages and killing them in gruesome ways.
2. Sounds like these bombers are deliberately luring our people in close. I wonder if the militants running where the same ones who had the suicide charges or if it was a bait-and-switch.