Kabul, Afghanistan – Militants killed a U.S. soldier and a Pakistani on Monday after a meeting in a Pakistani frontier town that sought to calm clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops along a border crossed daily by Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents.
The attack at Teri Mangal produced rare U.S. casualties inside Pakistan, an ally against terrorism that has uneasy relations with Afghanistan on how to deal with insurgents.
Two American and four Pakistani soldiers were reported wounded, along with two civilians working for the NATO force in Afghanistan whose nationalities were not released.
An Afghan army brigade commander who attended the meeting, Gen. Akrem, told The Associated Press that gunmen fired on the participants as they left a school building after the talks.
“From three directions, the gunmen opened fire – from the window of a classroom, from a building outside the school and from a hill,” said Akrem, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name.
A U.S. military official in Washington confirmed the American casualties.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was under investigation, said U.S. soldiers had gotten into a truck and were preparing to leave when a Pakistani militiaman walked up and opened fire. Return U.S. fire killed the gunman, the official said.
Pakistani Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad blamed the attack on unidentified “miscreants” – a word often used by Pakistan’s government to describe Islamic militants, who are active in the country’s lawless border region.
