NATO forces launched artillery strikes across the Afghan border at attackers who fired at them from Pakistan, and insurgents killed two police officers in an ambush southwest of the Afghan capital, officials said yesterday.
Officials also reported the deaths of five civilians, four of them in a rocket attack apparently aimed at a NATO air base near the mountainous frontier.
NATO said three rounds of “indirect fire” landed near an alliance outpost in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province on Saturday afternoon. Three more landed in an Afghan army compound. No casualties were reported.
A NATO statement said its forces determined the rounds were fired from inside Pakistan and returned artillery fire “in self-defense.”
Pakistan’s military was notified immediately after the initial attack, it said.
Afghan and US officials blame surging violence in Afghanistan in part on efforts by the new Pakistani government to make peace with militants on its side of the mountainous frontier.
Last year, more than 8,000 people were killed in insurgency-related attacks — the most since the 2001 US-led invasion — and violence has claimed more than 1,700 lives so far this year.
Pakistan’s army has pulled back some forces and largely held its fire during the peace talks — a pause that critics say has allowed militants to intensify strikes into Afghanistan.
Cross-border military relations were further strained when US warplanes apparently bombed a Pakistani border post in the Mohmand tribal region earlier this month, killing 11 Pakistani troops.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed regret over the incident, though it remains unclear why the Pakistani base was struck.
Pakistan’s army spokesman was not immediately available for comment yesterday.
Another Pakistani military official, who is not authorized to speak on the record, said the NATO rounds landed far from the nearest Pakistani border post.
The two Afghan policemen died on Saturday when insurgents ambushed their vehicle in the Jaghatu district of Wardak Province, 110km southwest of Kabul, secretary to the provincial police chief Mohammed Nabi said.
Nabi said two other police were wounded in the exchange of gunfire. He claimed five militants were killed, but said the fleeing attackers took the bodies with them.
In the east, Yakub Khan, deputy police chief in Khost Province, said a woman and three children died when one of several rockets fired toward the NATO air base near Khost City on Saturday evening hit their house.
Police in Kunar, another border province, said another woman died in crossfire between police and suspected Taliban insurgents in the Naranj district.
In the southern province of Helmand, police said a suicide bomber killed himself and a guard who challenged him at the entrance to the home of Abdul Qadoos, a pro-government tribal elder in the town of Gereshk.
In Kandahar city, witnesses said NATO troops opened fire on a car that strayed too close to their convoy, injuring a man and his son.
Soldiers evacuated the pair for treatment, said Wali Jan, the driver of the car, who was unhurt.
Kandahar, the main southern city and the Taliban’s former capital, has been on edge since the group sprang 400 fighters from the city jail on June 13 and then seized the nearby Arghandab Valley.
More than 1,000 Afghan and NATO troops scrambled to secure the city and mount a counteroffensive in the past week. The Afghan Defense Ministry said 94 militants and two Afghan soldiers died.
The operation took place amid a spate of roadside bomb attacks that lifted the death toll for foreign troops this month to 31, including five from the US-led coalition who perished on Saturday.
Afghanistan is currently more deadly than Iraq for foreign forces, a statistic the US administration has highlighted to lobby its NATO allies to send more forces to Afghanistan.
There are currently 60,000 foreign troops there.
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