Afghan soldier killed, US troopers wounded in shooting in Afghanistan

An Afghan army trooper has been killed and an unspecified number of US soldiers have been injured in an incident in northern Afghanistan, a US military official says.

The apparent shooting incident occurred on Saturday at Camp Shaheen, which is the headquarters of the Afghan Army's 209th Corps in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, said a spokesman for the US military command in the capital Kabul.

The official rejected an earlier report by Abdul Qahar Araam, a spokesman for the Afghan corps, who had said that an Afghan trooper had "shot and killed" four US soldiers inside the base in an apparent insider attack.

The US official went on to say that one Afghan soldier lost his life and another was injured in the incident, without giving further details. The US military command in Kabul had earlier confirmed that it was "aware of an incident" at the military base.

The deadly attack came just a week after a similar shooting took place in Achin district in the eastern province of Nangarhar, where an Afghan army soldier shot dead three US troopers and wounded another.

In March, three US soldiers were killed in yet another such attack in Helmand, the volatile province where the Taliban militant group still holds a grip.

The attacks by Afghan military personnel on foreign forces have occurred some 15 years after Washington led a Western military campaign to oust the Taliban from power.

The deadly incidents come as anti-US sentiments still run deep among Afghan police and military forces as many blame Washington for the continued bloodshed in the country. They say the US presence in Afghanistan continues to claim lives from civilians and security forces while attacks by the Taliban and other militant outfits, such as the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, are also on the rise.

Every so often, US troops or air raids kill both Afghan soldiers and civilians across the country. Earlier this month, US soldiers shot and killed an Afghan man and his two sons in Ghani Khel, a district in the south of Nangarhar.

Last August, a US drone attack killed 22 Afghan soldiers in Helmand, and in September that year airstrikes conducted by American warplanes claimed the lives of at least eight Afghan troops in the central province of Uruzgan. Back in February, US airstrikes also killed over 20 civilians in Helmand.

Despite the presence of thousands of foreign boots on the ground, Afghanistan has been rocked by an increase in terrorist attacks, some of them carried out by Taliban and others by Daesh, which is mainly active in Nangarhar.

American officials said last month that the US military needed between 3,000 and 5,000 additional troops, including hundreds of Special Operations forces, in Afghanistan. The United States currently has about 8,400 soldiers in Afghanistan with another 5,000 troops from NATO allies.

Afghanistan has already been torn apart by decades of Taliban-led militancy and the 2001 invasion by the United States and its allies.

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