KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — Militants ambushed and killed six U.S. troops walking in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan – the most lethal attack in a year that has been the deadliest for the U.S. military since the 2001 invasion.
The six troops killed Friday were returning from a meeting with village elders in Nuristan province. Militants wielding rocket-propelled grenades killed the six Americans and three Afghan soldiers. Eight U.S. troops were wounded.
“They were attacked from several enemy positions at the same time,” Lt. Col. David Accetta, a spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and the U.S. military, said Saturday. “It was a complex ambush.”
The six deaths bring the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year to at least 101, according to an Associated Press count, surpassing the 93 troops killed in 2005. About 87 died last year. In Iraq, U.S. military deaths this year surpassed 850, also a record.
Launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks, the war in Afghanistan quickly ousted al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors and appeared to have been a swift military victory.
But insurgent attacks – advanced ambushes and suicide and roadside bombs – have risen sharply the past two years, and analysts say the counterinsurgency battle that U.S. and NATO forces now face will take a decade or more to win.
