Two US service members killed by Afghan police officer

By NBC News and wire reports

Updated at 6:28 a.m. ET: KABUL, Afghanistan -- A newly recruited Afghan village police officer opened fire on his American allies on Friday, minutes after they gave him a new weapon as a present, killing two U.S. service members and another Afghan policeman, officials said.

It was the latest in a disturbing string of attacks by Afghan security forces on the international troops training them.

"Two U.S. Forces-Afghanistan service members died this morning as a result of an insider threat attack in Farah province, Afghanistan," Col. Hagen Messer, spokesman for the International Joint Command in the country, told NBC News. "Officials are investigating the incident to determine the facts and as more information becomes available it will be released as appropriate."

Details remained sketchy, but an official in the Bala Bolok District told NBC News that an Afghan policeman was also killed in the attack.

The attacker was identified as Mohammad Ismail, a man in his 30s who had joined the Afghan Local Police just five days ago.

He opened fire during an inauguration ceremony attended by American and Afghan national forces in the Kinisk village in the far western province of Farah, provincial police chief Agha Noor Kemtoz told The Associated Press.

"As soon as they gave the weapon to Ismail to begin training, suddenly he took the gun and opened fire toward the U.S. soldiers," Kemtoz said.

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Ismail was shot and killed as the coalition and Afghan forces returned fire, the police chief said.

Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the international coalition force, also confirmed that the shooter had been killed.

The Afghan Local Police, which is different from the Afghan National Police, is a village defense force being trained by international forces, including U.S. special forces.

It was not immediately clear to which branch of the U.S. military the dead Americans belonged.
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More than ten years after the beginning of the war, Afghanistan faces external pressure to reform as well as ongoing internal conflicts.

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The attack came at about 8 a.m. Friday after the U.S. forces arrived in the village of Kinisk to train members of the local police, Kemtoz said. He said one Afghan National Police officer was also seriously wounded in the shooting.
The killings in the country's far west marked the sixth time in two weeks that a member of the Afghan security forces, or someone wearing their uniform, opened fire on international forces.

Escalating

Such attacks — virtually unheard of just a few years ago — have recently escalated, killing at least 36 foreign troops so far this year and raising questions about the strategy to train national police and soldiers to take over security and fight insurgents after most foreign troops leave the country by the end of 2014.

The NATO-led coalition has said such attacks are anomalies stemming from personal disputes, but the supreme leader of the Taliban boasted on Thursday night that the insurgents are infiltrating the quickly expanding Afghan forces.

So far in 2012, there have been 28 attacks reported on foreign troops by Afghans they are training, compared to 11 attacks in 2011, according to an Associated Press count, and five attacks in each of the previous two years.

Six such attacks have come in the past two weeks alone, with six American troops killed last Friday in two separate shootings in Helmand province in the south and another American killed a few days previously on a U.S. base in Paktia province in the east.

The trend raises questions about potential resentment by Afghans after more than a decade of international presence and it also renews concern that insurgents may be infiltrating the Afghan army and police, despite intensified screening.
Insurgent infiltration or recruitment was behind only about 10 percent of this year's reported attacks on coalition forces by Afghan allies, Graybeal said earlier this week, citing investigations into attacks before those of the past week.
Graybeal insisted the deadly violence is relatively small scale compared to the nearly 340,000 Afghan security forces now being trained.

Two US service members killed by Afghan police officer - World News