KABUL: A NATO soldier is among 57 people -- most of them militants -- killed in new attacks, air strikes and clashes in an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan, authorities said Wednesday. Afghan and international security forces, who have stepped up operations ahead of August 20 elections, meanwhile destroyed Taliban heroin labs that bankroll the insurgents, the NATO-led force announced. The International Security Assistance Force soldier was killed in a 'hostile incident' in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, the 40-nation ISAF said in a statement that did not give the nationality of the trooper. The US military said meanwhile it had killed a Taliban commander with reported links to Iran's Revolutionary Guards and up to 16 militants with him in a precision air strike in the west on Tuesday. The strike was called in against Mullah Mustafa, who commanded about 100 men, as he travelled in the western province of Ghor, it said in a statement. 'Determining no civilians would be endangered, forces used precision aerial munitions to strike the group, killing Mustafa and as many as 16 other associated militants,' it said. Afghan officials however said they had reports that civilians, including children, were killed. They also could not confirm the targeted commander was among the dead. The US statement said the commander 'had recently met with senior Taliban leaders, and reportedly had connections to Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- Quds Force.' Western officials have said Tehran may be involved in the conflict in Afghanistan, where thousands of US troops are based, perhaps by supplying weapons to the Taliban or allowing them to transit through Iran. An Afghan police chief announced meanwhile that security forces had killed 30 Taliban militants over the past three days in an operation to clear extremists from the troubled southern province of Uruzgan ahead of the polls. Two police officers had also died, provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat told AFP. 'The aim of this operation is to create a safe and secure situation for the elections,' Himat said. Four more Taliban fighters were killed Wednesday in the northwestern Badghis province also aimed at providing a secure environment for the elections, said an Afghan army regional spokesman, Abdul Basir Ghori. There are fears that attacks by Taliban insurgents or the threat of violence could keep Afghans from voting in the election, the country's second-ever presidential poll and a key test of international efforts to instill democracy. Authorities said meanwhile that insurgent attacks in the central province of Ghazni on Wednesday had killed two policemen and an Afghan soldier. ISAF announced separately that its soldiers working with Afghan troops had destroyed a drugs hub in Helmand. Last week's operation in the southern province, a Taliban stronghold and main producer of Afghanistan's opium and heroin, was backed by British and Canadian helicopters and US jets flown in from the Gulf, it said. The raid would be a blow to the insurgent campaign as militants use money derived from the drug trade to arm themselves, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement. Violence has surged in Afghanistan in the past three years, despite the efforts of an international military deployment now numbering nearly 90,000 soldiers. US President Barack Obama has pledged 21,000 reinforcements this year, thousands of whom are already in place.