8 NATO Soldiers Killed in Southern Afghanistan, January 6, 2011

8 NATO Soldiers Killed in Southern Afghanistan

January 6, 2011

8 NATO Service Members Killed in Afghan Attacks

By GRAHAM BOWLEY and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK

Published: January 6, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan —

NATO said eight of its service members died in three attacks in southern Afghanistan, and an Afghan official on Friday identified four of the dead as American soldiers.

The attacks on Thursday and Friday struck at the heart of Afghanistan’s turbulent south. They come just as the American-led NATO command is gradually handing over security responsibility to the Afghan government after a decade of war. And the Taliban this week said they were ready to open a political office in Qatar, apparently a signal that they may be ready for formal peace talks.

Southern Afghanistan was the focus of the Obama administration’s troop “surge” in 2010, and American forces have made significant gains against the Taliban in many districts that had been thick with insurgents.

But the Taliban nonetheless remain potent in the south, especially in Kandahar, the province where the movement began in the mid-1990s.

NATO said one service member was killed Friday in what it described as an insurgent attack.

Four more were killed by a roadside bomb, also on Friday.

Another roadside bomb killed three service members on Thursday, NATO said in a statement released Friday. It did not identify the nationalities of those killed, and gave no more details.

The deadliest attack on Friday appeared to have taken place in Kandahar. Bacha Khan, the governor of Shah Wali Kot district in Kandahar Province, said four American soldiers died and one was wounded when a roadside bomb exploded while the soldiers were on morning patrol with the Afghan police.

The American soldiers belonged to a small military base in Shah Wali Kot, he said. Within the United States-led coalition, American forces are predominantly responsible for security in Kandahar Province.

A spokesman for the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, said the group had planted a bomb that struck a vehicle, killing four foreign soldiers. He said the insurgents had planted other explosives in an effort to disrupt a large joint NATO-Afghan military operation under way in the area.

The deaths brought to 10 the number of coalition troops who have died in the first week of 2012 as a result of the war in Afghanistan, according to figures from the Web site icasualties.org, an independent database that tracks casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to the database, 566 NATO troops died in Afghanistan in 2011, including 418 Americans. NATO is gradually transferring responsibility for security in Afghanistan to the Afghan police and military. The plan is for coalition forces to end active combat operations in 2014.

In an unrelated episode, also in southern Afghanistan, six children were killed in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, when a bomb exploded in a trash can near where they were playing, said Matiullah Khan, a senior police official. The bomb was in a suicide vest hidden in the trash can, the official said. Four other children were in critical condition, he said.

The Taliban staged an attack on Tirin Kot in the summer, sending a squad of at least seven suicide bombers into the town and killing at least 21 civilians, half of them children.

Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 7, 2012, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Attacks Hit Afghan South As Insurgents Set Off Blasts.

8 NATO troops killed in 24 hours in southern Afghanistan

By Laura King, Published: January 6, 2012

KABUL —

Eight NATO troops were killed in southern Afghanistan in a 24-hour period ending Friday, Western military officials said.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force did not disclose the nationalities of the troops, but most of those serving in southern Afghanistan are American or British. The south of Afghanistan includes the volatile provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the traditional heartland of the Taliban.

Faces of the Fallen: A collection of information about each U.S. service member who has died as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. View the service members by their home state.

Four of the eight were killed Friday in a single explosion, military officials said in a statement, and a fifth died as the result of an earlier “insurgent attack,” a phrase often used to characterize a firefight with Taliban militants.

Late Thursday, military officials announced that three troops were killed in the south by a makeshift bomb. Such crude but powerful bombs remain the largest single killer of Western troops in Afghanistan.

U.S. troop fatalities fell in 2011 for the first time in four years, and overall NATO deaths dropped as well. About 10,000 U.S. troops left Afghanistan in the latter part of last year, and 23,000 more are scheduled to depart by the end of this year.

U.S. commanders have said they expect the military focus this year to shift to eastern Afghanistan, bordering Pakistan’s tribal areas. The Haqqani network, considered the most dangerous insurgent group, operates mainly in the east.

But the south, which was the scene of major U.S.-led offensives during the past two years, shows signs that it has not been pacified. Local officials say that insurgents have filtered in to retake ground that had been gained by Western troops and that poppy cultivation and trafficking — a major revenue source for the Taliban and other militant groups — appear to be on the rise again.

Also Friday, explosives hidden in a trash heap killed six children in southern Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported, citing police accounts.

The children were rummaging through the trash for food scraps and bottles in Tarin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province, northwest of Kandahar, when the blast killed them, police said.

Four other children were injured in the blast, and a civilian man also died.

— Los Angeles Times

Fair Use Notice

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.