KABUL: A UN committee will visit Afghanistan this month to consider the removal of militants from its terrorism blacklist, an envoy said on Saturday, as alliance forces counted the cost of a deadly week. Staffan di Mistura said the visit will come at a “crucial period” after the recent “peace Jirga”, or conference, in Afghanistan, which produced a 16-point resolution that included a call for removing militant leaders from the list. “The review is due by the end of the month,” di Mistura, the United Nations’ special representative to the country, told a news briefing in the Afghan capital Kabul. However, he said its report might be delayed because it was “linked to a very delicate and important period in Afghanistan”. The envoy made his comments on a day when a Polish soldier was killed by an improvised bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan, becoming the 28th Nato soldier to die in a particularly violent week for the country and foreign troops. Nato forces are engaged in a major build-up centred on Kandahar aimed at bringing the nearly nine-year war to an end and drawing down foreign troop levels. But the last week saw an upsurge in Taliban attacks and the alliance has announced a two- to three-month delay in the peak of operations. On Wednesday, 40 people died in a suicide attack on a wedding outside Kandahar city attended by members of an anti-Taliban militia, one of the deadliest incidents so far this year. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates urged patience with the war as Nato’s International Security Assistance Force estimated the 142,000 soldiers in Afghanistan are set to increase to 150,000 by August as part of a troop surge. Gates on Friday acknowledged that the signs of progress so far were “tentative”, but said a promising new approach involving the massive troop surge had only been under way a few months and needed time. He admitted Afghanistan had been neglected by Washington after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, with too few troops deployed, and that a “long and difficult” fight lay ahead. This month’s “peace Jirga” advised the government to seek the removal of names — including Mullah Mohammad Omar — from the UN Security Council blacklist compiled after the September 11 2001 attacks on the US.Omar was supreme leader of the Taliban during their 1996 to 2001 rule of Afghanistan. The list designated as terrorists Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders who were based in Afghanistan at the time, and helped to provide a UN-sanctioned justification for the US-led invasion of the country in November 2001. “The momentum of the peace Jirga, which was a success, needs to be maintained,” di Mistura told reporters in his Saturday briefing. “Some of the people on the list may not even be alive any more. The list could be completely outdated,” he added, but stressed that the decision to remove names from the blacklist would be up to the Security Council.