Afghan soldier shoots, wounding 2 US troops

KABUL - Agence France-Presse

An Afghan National Army soldier aiming his rifle during a training in this file photo. AP photo

An Afghan army soldier turned his gun on his NATO colleagues yesterday injuring two U.S. troops, officials said, just a day after a local policeman killed three foreign civilian contractors working for NATO in the western province of Herat.

“An Afghan army soldier opened fire on US soldiers inside a military base... and injured two U.S. soldiers. The attacker was killed in return fire,” Faryab’s deputy provincial governor Abdul Satar Barez told AFP. The incident in the northern province of Faryab is the latest in a series of so-called “green-on-blue” attacks involving members of the Afghan national security forces targeting their NATO allies.

NATO’s US-led International Security Assistance Force, to which most of the 130,000 Western troops in Afghanistan are attached, confirmed the incident but refused to give information on casualties.

Earlier this month, three British soldiers were shot dead by a man in an Afghan police uniform in the southern province of Helmand. And last week an Afghan soldier was sentenced to death for killing five French soldiers in Kapisa province in January.