KABUL, June 9, (AFP): Taleban militants shot down a NATO helicopter in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing four US soldiers and bringing to 23 the number of foreign troops killed in escalating violence so far this week.
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) helicopter came down in Helmand province, a stronghold of Taleban fighting to topple the Western-backed government and evict the 130,000 US-led foreign troops in Afghanistan.
“Four ISAF service members were killed in the crash,” a military spokesman said. “The helicopter was brought down by hostile fire,” he added.
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Breasseale later confirmed that the dead soldiers were American.
Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taleban spokesman, telephoned AFP from an undisclosed location to claim responsibility for the incident.
“We brought it down with a rocket. It crashed in the Sangin district bazaar today at around 10:00 am (0530 GMT),” Ahmadi said.
According to an AFP tally based on the independent website icasualties.org, 253 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year. Last year was the deadliest yet, with 520 killed.
Much of southern Afghanistan is troubled by a nearly nine-year Taleban insurgency, now in its deadliest phase, and is where US and Nato troops are building up a campaign to flush the militants out of Kandahar city.
The crash brought to five the number of Nato soldiers killed in the south on Wednesday, after the military announced that a separate soldier had been killed by an improvised bomb explosion, the Taleban weapon of choice.
Twenty-three Nato soldiers have died since Sunday, including 10 on Monday when US-led forces in Afghanistan encountered their deadliest day in combat in two years, with seven Americans, two Australians and a French soldier killed. In the east, three policemen were killed when their vehicle struck an improvised bomb in Ghazni province on Wednesday, Khyalbaz Sherzai, the Ghazni provincial police chief told AFP.
The Taleban also claimed responsibility for that attack.
Despite the mounting casualties, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday in London that he expected to see signs of progress in a flagship counter-insurgency strategy “by the end of the year.”
Gates said the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, “is pretty confident that by the end of the year he will be able to point to sufficient progress that validates the strategy and also justifies continuing to work at this.”
Speaking in London, Gates said the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, “is pretty confident that by the end of the year he will be able to point to sufficient progress that validates the strategy and also justifies continuing to work at this”.
But he cautioned that there were “no illusions” about quick victories and that there was a difficult struggle ahead, warning it would be “tough summer” battling Taleban insurgents.
Underscoring the rising violence in Afghanistan, military officers in Kabul said four Nato soldiers were killed Wednesday when their helicopter was shot down by hostile fire in the southern Afghan province of Helmand.
Gates said the United States and its allies were under pressure to show some success in the war, now in its ninth year.
In his meetings with Britain’s new defence secretary, Liam Fox, Gates said there was “general agreement yesterday in all of my meetings that all of us, for our publics, are going to have show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway.”
He said improving government services and civilian development efforts formed an important part of the effort, but he said the rationale for the war was not a nation-building exercise.
“The reason we are there is for our own security,” he said. “We are not there to build 21st century Afghanistan. None of us will be alive that long.”
He said the United States had been attacked by al-Qaeda militants based in Afghanistan in 2001 and “we want to make sure we are never attacked again from out of there.”