KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) -- A British soldier has been killed and another NATO soldier wounded in attacks in Afghanistan while police said they killed 10 Taliban who tried to capture a district headquarters.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldier was killed in an insurgent attack in Helmand province, ISAF said in a statement.

The Ministry of Defense in London announced the soldier was British. Most of the foreign troops in Helmand are with a British deployment of about 4,750.

ISAF did not immediately release details of the attack, which the ministry said occurred in the north of the province at about 5:00 am.

Helmand police said meanwhile that about 40 Taliban fighters late Saturday stormed the headquarters of Musa Qala district, also in the north of the province, sparking a three-hour gunfight in which 10 Taliban were killed.

Police repelled the attack on the compound, which includes the office of the district governor and police, without casualties, provincial police chief Mohammad Nabi Mullahkhail told AFP.

He said five Taliban bodies were left at the scene of the fighting and the rebels took five away with them.

There have been several attacks in Musa Qala, where British forces last week took over from a Danish contingent that had come under near daily attack.

In a separate incident early Sunday, a base in Kandahar province came under mortar fire that wounded an ISAF soldier and six Afghans, the NATO-led force said without releasing the nationality of the foreign troop.

A Canadian force of about 2,300 soldiers is based in Kandahar.

The latest death takes to 81 the number of foreign soldiers who have died in hostile action in Afghanistan this year, including 12 ISAF troops killed in the south since the NATO force took command of the area from a US-led coalition on July 31.

The 10,000-strong ISAF force in the south, on the alliance's most ambitious military mission, have faced a barrage of attacks since moving into the hostile area.

Commanders have said they need more troops and equipment to confront a stiffer than expected resistance from the Taliban, whom experts say are working with drugs barons and other players who profit from lawlessness.

A coalition led by the United States removed the Taliban from power in 2001 when the hardliners did not hand over Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks.

An insurgency launched by the extremists has been growing in strength, peaking this year with a more sophisticated attacks on military forces accompanying a stepped-up campaign of suicide and roadside bombings.

At a rough estimate, about 1,500 people have been killed in violence this year, around 1,000 of them rebels. The head of U.S. forces in parts of Africa and the Middle East, General John Abizaid, said during a visit Saturday that while the Taliban would be able to continue mounting their campaign thanks to their foreign sources of income, it was unlikely their action would prove to be "decisive"

The rebels had taken heavy casualties and had not "exerted control for any substantial period of time in any major population area," Abizaid told reporters.

"Certainly they managed to take some district capitals for short periods of time, but those have been largely media victories and not military victories," he said.