KABUL — An Afghan worker on a military base in southern Afghanistan opened fire and killed three NATO service members, military officials said Saturday, bringing the toll to six Western military fatalities in 24 hours at the hands of allies.
The NATO force said the attack took place late Friday in Helmand province, the Taliban movement’s heartland, where a turncoat shooting hours earlier killed three elite special-operations U.S. Marines.
Compounding the carnage, a rogue Afghan police officer in Nimruz province turned his weapon on fellow Afghan officers Saturday, killing 10 of them, Afghan officials said. The assailant was thought to be a Taliban infiltrator, said provincial spokesman Fazel Omer Baloch.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force has sought to play down the military significance of attacks on Western troops by Afghan police, soldiers or employees of the government or military. But such shootings have escalated this year, with three lethal attacks on American troops in the past week alone.
Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz of Germany, who is the chief spokesman for the NATO force, pointed out that thousands of Afghan and foreign soldiers work together on a daily basis without episodes of violence.
“Those two incidents clearly do not reflect the overall situation here in Afghanistan,” Katz said in Kabul.
Troops in the field, however, say the repeated killings have created a climate of mistrust.
At least 34 NATO service members have died this year in such shootings, poised to surpass the tally of 35 such deaths in all of 2011. An undisclosed number of others have been wounded. The NATO force does not generally report the attacks unless there is a fatality.
Afghan and Western military officials have taken measures to try to stem the casualties, including tighter vetting for Afghan recruits and having armed Western troops, dubbed “guardian angels,” watching over comrades as they eat and sleep.
In the latest incident, an Afghan working on a jointly run U.S. and Afghan installation at a police headquarters ambushed a group of troops about 8 p.m., killing three, said Helmand provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi. NATO military officials did not reveal the victims’ nationalities.
