Peru's UN Ambassador Jorge Voto-Bernales, the council president for November, said a nine-member team from the 15-member council would leave for Islamabad November 10 on its way to Afghanistan where it was due to arrive on November 12.

The mission is due back at UN headquarters on November 17 and the Security Council is to hear a briefing on the trip on November 22, Voto-Bernales told reporters.

In late September, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said his Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf had promised to crack down on Islamist militants and religious schools breeding extremism.

Karzai then blamed other countries' religious schools, or madrasas, for promoting the extremism fuelling Afghanistan's Taliban-led insurgency.

He was clearly referring to neighbouring Pakistan, home to madrasas from which the Taliban emerged in the early 1990s.

The Taliban is waging a virulent insurgency in Afghanistan. The rebels, who are allied with al-Qaeda, have attacked troops in large numbers and intensified a campaign of suicide and roadside bombings.

More than 2,500 people, most of them militants, have been killed in unrest so far this year, nearly double last year's toll. Scores of civilians have also been caught up in the violence.

US-led forces launched the war against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies shortly after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

Meanwhile, Taliban insurgents ambushed a police convoy in western Afghanistan killing a district police chief and five others, and wounding three other policemen, police said yesterday.

Mohammad Sediq, police chief of Adraskan district of Herat province was visiting police posts in the area Thursday when his convoy came under attack, Herat province's police chief, Nisar Ahmad Paikar, told AFP.

Paikar blamed the attack on remnants of Taliban who have waged an insurgency since 2001 when they were forced out of power by US-led invasion of Afghanistan.