Afghan Soldier Kills American and Wounds 3 Others

[High_Gravity]

Its obvious at this point the Taliban have infiltrated and the Afghan Military and police, and our men and women are sitting ducks being killed by the very same people they are supposed to be training.

Afghan Soldier Kills American and Wounds 3 Others

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan soldier turned his gun on American military personnel while they were playing volleyball at a camp in southern Afghanistan, killing one and wounding three others before being fatally shot, the Afghan police said on Monday.

It was the third time in just over two weeks that a man wearing an Afghan Army uniform attacked NATO personnel. In the earlier cases, the Taliban claimed responsibility, although there was no immediate claim in this case that the Afghan soldier had Taliban sympathies.

The attack took place on Sunday afternoon in Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province. The Afghan soldier approached the volleyball game and appeared to watch the soldiers play before opening fire with an M-16 assault rifle, said Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy police chief of Zabul Province. Another American soldier who heard the firing shot and killed the attacker, he said.

The coalition released only a brief statement, late on Sunday, saying that a service member “was killed today in southern Afghanistan apparently by a member of the Afghan National Army.”

Afghan soldiers have repeatedly shot their NATO counterparts in recent years, and there is widespread concern among NATO and Afghan commanders that insurgents might be infiltrating the ranks of the Afghan security forces.

Mohammad Ashraf Nasiri, the governor of Zabul Province, had a slightly different account of the number of Americans who were injured in the shooting, As well as one American who died, he said only one American soldier was wounded.

Deputy Chief Farahi said the police were investigating what had caused the Afghan soldier, whom he identified as Shafiullah, to open fire at the camp.

He said Mr. Shafiullah, originally from a Pashtun-dominated region of eastern Afghanistan, was a religious man who spent a lot of his time in the mosque near the camp. He said the soldier and his family used to live in Quetta, Pakistan, which is where the leadership of the Taliban is believed to be located, although Quetta also has hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees with no ties to the Taliban. Coalition authorities were now requesting that the Afghan commander of the local garrison hand over details about the soldier’s identity and his references, he said.

In the first of the attacks last month, in late December an Afghan soldier opened fire on American soldiers in the western province of Farah during a joint patrol. Only the Afghan soldier was killed in that attack, which was preceded by an argument between the Afghans and the Americans.

A few days later, a man wearing an Afghan Army uniform gunned down two members of the French Foreign Legion in the east of the country before being fatally shot.

Separately, the bodies of four American service members killed in a roadside bombing last week in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan were returned to the United States, The Associated Press reported. They were among eight NATO service members who were killed in three separate insurgent attacks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/w...lls-american-and-wounds-3-others.html?_r=1&hp