ROME/KABUL, 24 September 2007 — Two Italian soldiers have gone missing in Afghanistan, Italian authorities said yesterday. Earlier agency reports said two Italians, possibly journalists, had been kidnapped in the west of Afghanistan. “Contact with two Italian soldiers was lost some hours ago,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “From our checks no journalists are missing, contrary to early reports,” it said.
The Defense Ministry also issued a statement saying two soldiers were missing and their families had been informed.
An Afghan-based Western security analyst said there were reports the two missing men had been working for Italian intelligence. He said the men, together with two Afghan translators, had gone missing on Saturday in the area around Shindand, on the border between Farah and Herat provinces in western Afghanistan, the site of a large former Soviet air base now used by US and Afghan forces.
Gen. Alikhan Hosseini, the head of criminal investigations in western Afghanistan, said he had heard on police radio that two foreigners were missing, but could not offer any more details. The police chief of Farah province said he did not know anything about any foreigners missing in his province and said his forces were currently engaged in a firefight with Taleban rebels.
There has been a steady rise in Taleban activity in Farah province in recent months
Meanwhile, NATO-led and Afghan forces are investigating whether four people they killed in eastern Afghanistan were Taleban rebels, members of the Afghan security forces or civilians, a spokesman said yesterday.
The issue of civilian casualties is a sensitive one. Afghan leaders have accused foreign forces operating in the country of not taking enough care to verify their targets before opening fire, particularly when using air power.
The two main foreign forces in Afghanistan, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the US-led coalition, both say they take extreme care to avoid civilian casualties and blame the Taleban for operating among the people.
Afghan and ISAF troops called in air support after an Afghan Army base in the Sarkani district of the eastern province of Kunar came under rocket attack on Saturday, an ISAF statement said.
ISAF helicopters identified a group of 30 suspected insurgents at the place where they believed the rockets were fired from and attacked them, killing four and wounding 12 others. But initial reports suggested the suspected insurgents were in fact Afghan police or armed road construction security guards dressed in civilian clothes, the statement said. “It is not clear at this time ... if these were a combination of civilian or Afghan security forces and civilians or something else,” said ISAF spokesman Maj. Charles Anthony.
“One thing we know for sure is that they were Afghans, the Forward Operating Base was attacked by rockets from that location where the casualties took place, that much is very clear,” he said.
The fact that the Taleban do not wear uniforms and operate from among the civilian population made identifying targets more difficult, Anthony said. “There are probably eight to 10 incidents a day taking place all around this country,” he said. “Sometimes it is very clear what has happened and occasionally it is not so clear.”
Elsewhere, US led coalition forces and Afghan troops detained nine insurgents in the province of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul yesterday, the US military said in a statement.
Police said they found the bodies of two retired policemen beheaded by Taleban, who had accused them of spying for the US-led military. The headless corpses were found in Ghazni province’s Qarabagh district, where Taleban militants kidnapped 23 South Koreans mid-July, police official Mohammad Zaman said.
