It was not clear if there were any casualties from the airstrike.

"We conducted an airstrike on a target we deemed we had to hit immediately. The target was an enemy compound in Kunar province," US military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara said. "The bombing was done using precision guided munitions. The target objective was intelligence driven."

He said a "battle damage assessment is ongoing" and declined to speculate on casualties from the attack, which happened at dusk on Friday. O'Hara also declined to say if the airstrike was directly related to the missing military team.

He said earlier Saturday that there had been no sign of the team by rescuers who are desperately scouring the mountains near Asadabad town, Kunar province, close to the Pakistani border.

A purported Taliban spokesman claimed Friday that militants had captured one of the men.

Meanwhile, thirty-one people, most of them Taliban insurgents, have been killed in new battles in southern Afghanistan, an official said yesterday.

The latest casualties in Uruzgan province increased the death toll in the restive region to 47 within a week.

Uruzgan governor Jan Moham-mad Khan said 25 rebels and six policemen were killed as more than 100 policemen swarmed through Tagab village and clashed with militants on Friday.

Four policemen and five suspected Taliban rebels were killed in a Taliban attack on a police checkpost in the early hours of Friday morning and another 20 militants and two policemen were killed in clashes later that day, he added.

"Now we've 25 Taliban killed in the fighting -- 20 of them later Friday afternoon," he told AFP, adding another militant was captured.

Khan said the hunt for the guerrillas was ongoing.

Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi, a spokesman for the rebels, confirmed the fighting but said they had lost only six of their soldiers.

"We killed 14 police on Friday morning -- the government attacked us in the afternoon in which we lost six of our mujahedin," he said.

His claims could not be independently confirmed.

The village in Uruzgan's Charchino district has been the scene of bloody clashes between police and the ousted militia in the past week.

On Thursday Taliban insurgents attacked the same village and kidnapped nine village elders and a child, accusing them of spying for the American troops.