| Afghan cop shot dead after killing 2 US troops |
KABUL Two American soldiers were killed by a member of the Afghan local police on Friday in a new ‘green-on-blue’ attack, Nato said, as concern over the unprecedented number of insider killings mounts.
The latest deaths take to 39 the number of international troops killed in 28 such attacks so far this year, according to Nato figures.
The attack came a week after six American troops were killed in a single day by their local colleagues and will further erode trust between foreign troops and the Afghans they work with.
“Two US Forces-Afghanistan service members died this morning as a result of an insider threat attack in (western) Farah province,” the US-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said.
“A member of the Afghan Local Police turned his weapon against two USFOR-A service members. The attacker was shot and killed.”
US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said on Tuesday he was “very concerned” about the rise in ‘insider attacks’ and the impact they are having on cooperation with Afghan allies.
Nato says most of the incidents are motivated by cultural differences between troops and plays down the role of Taliban infiltration.
“What we identified was that most of them were caused by personal grievances and stress situations,” the chief spokesman for Isaf, Brigadier General Gunter Katz, said.
“Those isolated incidents don’t reflect the overall security situation in Afghanistan. As we speak 500,000 soldiers and policemen are working together to contribute to a more secure and stable Afghanistan,” he said.
“We are confident that the morale (among international troops) is still good and those incidents will not affect our transition process.”
Panetta, however, admitted that he was “very concerned about these incidents... because of the lives lost and because of the potential damage to our partnership efforts”.
Agencies
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