At least three Nato officers killed in Afghan ‘insider attack’

An attacker in an Afghan army uniform killed at least three service members from the Nato-led coalition and wounded a senior Afghan commander today in a shooting at a military training academy on the outskirts of Kabul.

Details of the shooting were sketchy, and the coalition would only confirm that "an incident" had taken place at the Afghan National Army Officer Academy.

An Afghan defence official said at least three coalition officers had been killed, and that a number of other foreign and Afghan officers had been wounded. The dead coalition service members were believed to be senior officers, the Afghan official said.

Germany's Der Spiegel reported that a two star US general was killed, but this was not confirmed by the international force in Afghanistan.

The Afghan official and a coalition official said that it appeared that the foreign casualties were high-ranking officers who were taking part in a meeting at the academy.

Lt Gen Afzal Aman, the director of operations at Afghanistan’s defence ministry, said that the academy’s commander, Brig Gen Ghulam Saki, was wounded in the shooting along with two other senior Afghan officers.

Lt Gen Aman added that it was only US officers who were present during the shooting, but said he could not provide any additional details because the entire academy was under lockdown and information remained scarce.

The attacker was killed, the defence official said.

Sher Alam, an Afghan soldier guarding the entrance to the academy, located at Camp Qargha, said senior Afghan and coalition officers had been meeting there today, and that reports from inside the camp indicated that a number of the foreign officers were killed in the attack.

He said soon after the shooting, coalition helicopters landed inside the academy to evacuate the dead and wounded. Today’s shooting was the first so-called insider attack in Afghanistan in months.

Such attacks, in which Afghan troops open fire on unsuspecting coalition forces, at one point posed a serious challenge to the war effort, sowing distrust and threatening to upend the US-led training mission that is vital to the long-term strategy for keeping the Taliban at bay.

Though the number of attacks has dropped sharply since 2012, when dozens occurred, they remain a persistent threat for coalition troops serving alongside Afghan forces.

Afghan and US commanders have said that they believe most of the insider attacks that have taken place were the work of ordinary soldiers who had grown alienated and angry over the continued presence of foreign troops here, and not carried out by Taliban fighters planted in Afghan units.

The Taliban, which often takes credit for insider attacks, had no immediate comment.

New York Times