Gunmen in Afghan uniforms strike again; 2 die
KABUL — A day after an assailant wearing an Afghan army uniform killed a U.S. soldier in eastern Afghanistan, two insurgents dressed in Afghan police uniforms Saturday shot and killed two coalition soldiers in the south of the country, NATO said.
NATO did not confirm the nationality of those killed. But a spokesman for the governor of Helmand province said the attack occurred in the Gereshk district of Helmand, and that those attacked were British soldiers. The spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said two attackers in national Afghan police uniforms opened fire on NATO troops on a highway at a checkpoint near a base where British forces are stationed.
As the attackers tried to escape, Afghan police officers chased them and killed one, but the second attacker escaped, he said.
The attack was the latest in a string of assaults on NATO soldiers by their Afghan partners. NATO said that in the latest episode the attackers were not actually trained police officers but insurgents who were wearing police uniforms.
“Our reporting right now says that they were insurgents dressed in police uniform,” said a NATO spokesman in Kabul, Sgt. Thomas Dow.
He said two international coalition soldiers had been killed, although Ahmadi and the Helmand police said one NATO soldier had been killed and one wounded.
A spokesman for the Helmand police, Fareed Ahmad Farhang, said both gunmen were killed. He said the shootings occurred on the highway from Helmand to Kandahar province.
Also Saturday, a roadside bomb killed a third NATO serviceman, while a fourth died of nonbattle-related injuries. All four deaths occurred in the south, where much of the fighting in the more than 10-year conflict has been concentrated, the alliance said in a statement.
So far this month, 18 NATO servicemen have been killed in Afghanistan.
Separately, four Afghan police officers were killed in the northwestern province of Badghis when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Qadis district, said the provincial governor’s spokesman, Sharafudin Majedi.
Meanwhile, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan held talks with Pakistan’s army chief Saturday aimed at improving border coordination, almost six months after American airstrikes accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the frontier.
Islamabad retaliated for the deaths in November by closing its border crossings to supplies meant for NATO troops in Afghanistan. The border remains closed despite U.S. pressure to reopen the route, which has long been one of the main ways to get goods and equipment to coalition forces in landlocked Afghanistan.
The meeting between U.S. Gen. John Allen and Pakistani army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, which the Pakistani army announced in a written statement, followed several other discussions between senior U.S. and Pakistani officials in recent weeks.
There is incentive on both sides to resolve the impasse over the NATO supply route. The U.S. has had to spend considerably more money over the past few months shipping supplies to Afghanistan through the more expensive northern route that runs through Central Asia. The route through Pakistan will become even more important as the U.S. begins to pull out equipment as it withdraws most of its combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Islamabad is eager to free up more than a billion dollars in U.S. military aid that has been frozen for the past year and would likely only be released once the supply route is reopened. Another potential carrot could be an invitation to the NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21, which will largely focus on the Afghan war.
A pair of high-level meetings are expected to occur in Pakistan this week to discuss reopening the NATO supply route. They include one by the Cabinet and another by the defense committee of the Cabinet, which includes the head of the Pakistan army and its powerful intelligence arm, the ISI.