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Taliban fighters beheaded two young boys today as a warning to Afghan villagers not to co-operate with the country’s government.

The boys, aged 10 and 16, had been scrounging for food around army and police checkpoints in Kandahar province.

They were killed on their way home.

Meanwhile the Taliban attacked Nato HQ at Kabul airport with bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.

All seven fighters were killed in the gun battle that followed.

Elsewhere another six militants wearing suicide bomb vests tried to storm a council building in Zabul province, where 18 people were wounded - including three police officers - when they detonated a car bomb in the city of Qalat.

On the outskirts of Kabul, three more attempted to attack a district police headquarters, but officers killed one attacker and arrested two others who tried to storm the headquarters building in the Surobi district.

President Hamid Karzai said violence “cannot change the chosen path of the Afghan people toward progress, development, peace and elections.”