KABUL, 9 June 2005 — Insurgents launched a mortar attack on a US military base in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, killing two members of the US armed forces and wounding eight, the US military said.

Taleban guerrillas claimed responsibility. Twelve US soldiers have been killed in a wave of clashes, blasts and rebel ambushes in Afghanistan since late March. US troops were preparing to unload supplies from a Chinook helicopter at a forward operating base at Shkin, near Paktika province’s border with Pakistan, when the attack occurred, a US military statement said.

“The figures have changed: now we have two military service members killed and eight, a combination of military service members and civilians, wounded,” Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara told AFP.

The toll was earlier given as one service member dead and eight others wounded. Warplanes from the US-led coalition scrambled to the scene after the latest attack “but were unable to locate the insurgents,” a US military statement said. The wounded service members were transported to medical facilities at other US bases in Afghanistan, the statement said.

A Taleban commander, speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, said his men had launched the raid. “We carried out the attack when US soldiers were unloading weapons from a helicopter. Our sources say two were killed and many wounded,” said the official, known as Mulla Dadullah.

Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the rebels carried out the attack but said they had fired a rocket, not a mortar bomb.

Meanwhile, the mother of an Italian aid worker kidnapped in Afghanistan appealed for her daughter’s release in a recording broadcast yesterday on Afghan television. Clementina Cantoni, 32, was abducted by armed men on May 16 as she was being driven to her home in the capital, Kabul. She was working for CARE International on a project helping Afghan widows and their families.

The two-minute video features an appeal from her mother, Germana, who is briefly heard speaking in English before a translated voiceover starts in Dari, the main local language.

The video shows pictures of Germana and then her daughter, both as a child and as an adult working in Afghanistan.