KABUL (AFP) -- A suicide attacker killed a French soldier in Kabul and about 40 Taleban rebels were killed elsewhere in Afghanistan Friday as bloodshed marred the United Nations' International Day of Peace.

Afghan officials meanwhile said that six civilians had been killed earlier in the week in an air strike by NATO-led forces carrying out a major operation against the Islamic extremist fighters.
The Al-Qaeda-linked Taleban movement claimed responsibility for the suicide attack, the first inside the heavily barricaded city in three weeks. It also wounded six Afghans.
The French military, which has around 1,000 soldiers in Afghanistan as part of a 37-nation NATO-led force, confirmed that its soldiers were struck.
""One of them died,"" squadron leader Jean-Philippe Mouille told AFP.
Around 165 international soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year -- the bloodiest since the insurgent Taleban were removed from government in late 2001.
One side of the targeted French armored vehicle, which bore the country's flag, was damaged but the car that carried the bomb was completely destroyed, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
A civilian car stood smouldering nearby and a bus stood empty, its windows blasted out. The attacker's flesh littered the site. Two NATO helicopters circled above the area.
A witness, Jan Mohammad, told AFP he saw five foreign soldiers being carried away after the blast but could not say if they were dead or wounded.
One of the wounded Afghans was trapped inside a burning car and pulled out by an Afghan policeman, said another witness, who did not give his name.
There have been more than 100 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year, most of them blamed on the Taleban's intensifying insurgency, which sees almost daily attacks in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Soldiers led by the U.S. military struck militant hideouts in the volatile south early Friday, killing about 40 rebels and destroying one of the largest caches of weapons it has ever found, the U.S.-led coalition said.
The operation was in the southern province of Helmand, Afghanistan's top opium-growing area, which sees some of the worst fighting of the Taliban's anti-government insurgency, funded in part by the drugs trade.
The coalition, which operates alongside the NATO military deployment and Afghan security forces, said about 40 ""anti-coalition militants"" were killed. This makes it one of the deadliest strikes in weeks.
""This was one of the largest caches of weapons found to date,"" coalition spokesman Major Christopher Belcher said. ""Several rooms were found filled with small-arms, explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and large-calibre ammunition,"" he said.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force admitted separately that it had killed civilians in the course of a new anti-Taliban operation launched in Helmand on Wednesday.
It did not give a figure but a district governor said six civilians, most of them women and children, were killed in an air strike called against Taliban fighters during the course of the operation.
The new carnage comes on the UN's International Day of Peace, for which the UN mission in Afghanistan called for a cessation of the violence between militants and international security forces.
The insurgency has intensified, particularly over the past two years, with more than 5,000 people killed this year, according to an AFP count.
Most of the dead are rebels but more than 700 civilians have also been killed, around half in Taliban attacks and half in action by Afghan and international military forces.
The Taliban hardliners were ousted from government in late 2001 after a US-led invasion launched weeks after the 9/11 attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda