One in six of the 90 foreign soldiers to have died in Afghanistan since January has been killed in so-called “green-on-blue” attacks that have significantly raised tensions between NATO forces and their local colleagues.
In the latest incident, an Afghan official said the gunman approached a reconstruction team base in Lashkar Gah, the main town in Helmand province, where there was “apparently” an argument and the man opened fire.
A Western source said that the two NATO victims were British and that another Briton was severely wounded. An Afghan soldier and the killer were also shot dead.
The source said the gunman was an Afghan soldier, rather than an impostor. The Afghan Defense Ministry in Kabul declined to comment. The deaths are the latest in a series of such killings that have seen 15 personnel of NATO’s US-led International Security Assistance Force die this year, an ISAF spokesman said, declining to confirm the two men’s nationality.
NATO is training Afghan forces to take over national security by the end of 2014, allowing foreign combat troops to withdraw after a costly and lengthy war against the Taleban insurgency.
Helmand is a Taleban stronghold but Lashkar Gah was among the first places where responsibility for security was handed from ISAF to Afghan forces as part of a gradual transition process.
The deaths come less than three weeks after six British soldiers were killed when a huge explosion ripped through their armored vehicle near Lashkar Gah.
Taleban insurgents claimed responsibility for that attack, which pushed the number of British dead in Afghanistan over the 400 mark.
Aside from yesterday’s shooting, previous green-on-blue attacks this year have killed six Americans, four French Army trainers, an Albanian and two ISAF personnel whose nationality has not been disclosed.
The frequency of the incidents reached a peak after copies of the Qur'an were burned at an incinerator pit at the US-run Bagram airbase, leading US President Barack Obama to apologize for what he described as an error.
Around 40 people were killed in days of violent demonstrations as protesters targeted Western bases.
At one point NATO withdrew all its advisers from Afghan government ministries after two US officers were killed inside the Interior Ministry, apparently by an Afghan colleague. Some, but not all, have since returned.
On March 11, a massacre of 17 Afghan civilians, including nine children and four women, blamed on a lone American soldier brought relations between Kabul and Washington to a further low.
A classified coalition report leaked to The New York Times earlier this year described green-on-blue shootings as a “systemic” problem.
The report put the killings down to a decade of deep-seated animosity on each side, and profound ill-will among both civilians and soldiers on both sides, downplaying the role of possible Taleban infiltrators in such incidents.
Britain is the second biggest contributor of troops to Afghanistan after the US with 9,500 soldiers, but it is set to pull out all combat forces by the end of 2014 in line with other NATO nations. An ISAF statement said an Afghan and NATO investigation had been opened into the latest killings.
