Taleban attack on US base kills two American soldiers

8 June 2005

KABUL - Taleban militants fired on a US base in southeastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing two American soldiers and wounding eight others, including civilians, the US military and the ousted regime said.

The victims were preparing to unload supplies from a Chinook helicopter at the forward operating base at Shkin in Paktika province when a mortar bomb crashed into the compound, the US military said in a statement.

Afghanistan has been gripped by a recent wave of violence blamed on the hardline Taleban miltia, which claimed responsibility for the latest attack.

“The figures have changed: now we have two military service members killed and eight, a combination of military service members and civilians, wounded,” Lieutentant Colonel Jerry O’Hara told AFP.

The toll was earlier given as one service member dead and eight others wounded.

Warplanes from the US-led coalition scrambled to the scene after the latest attack “but were unable to locate the insurgents,” a US military statement said.

The wounded service members were transported to medical facilities at other US bases in Afghanistan, the statement said.

Taleban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi said the rebels carried out the attack but said they had fired a rocket, not a mortar bomb.

“We claim the responsibility for the rocket fired at a US base in Paktika,” Hakimi told AFP by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

Two US soldiers died when a bomb hit their vehicle in the same province Friday and a suicide attack on a mosque in southern Kandahar city a week ago killed 21 people.

Paktika, near the border with Pakistan, is a hotbed of activity for Taleban militants.

“This is a tragic loss for all of us. A US service member has paid the ultimate price for freedom, giving his life so that others might live in a nation free of tyranny and oppression,” said senior officer US Army Brigadier General James G. Champion.

More than 18,000 coalition troops, most of them American, are in Afghanistan hunting down the Taleban, who continue to wage a guerrilla-style insurgency three and a half years after they were toppled from power.