By Steve Hynd
An Afghan soldier opened fire on NATO troops, lightly wounding one alliance soldier, the international force in Afghanistan said on Sunday, the latest in a string of attacks by rogue Afghan forces.
Major Marcin Walczak, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said the Afghan soldier fled after opening fire on a group of NATO and other Afghan troops in Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, late on Saturday.
NATO did not identify the nationality of the wounded soldier. The NATO-led force in Ghazni is mainly manned by Polish troops.
A Taliban spokesman using the name Zabihullah Mujahid said the Afghan attacker had joined the insurgent movement after witnessing "brutalities against Afghans", and the man he had wounded was Polish.
There have now been five such incidents of Afghan security forces opening fire on their foreign counterparts in the last 12 months, including one that took the lives of five British servicemen. By contrast, there have only been three such incidents reported in Iraq ever, since the 2003 invasion there, and all were in the Mosul area.
It may be that there's a general conclusion to be drawn from these incidents about relative progress, the success of counter-insurgency tactics and the level of antipathy to the forces of occupation which goes way beyond opinion polling. Bullets speak louder than words.
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