German friendly fire kills Afghan soldiers - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

German friendly fire kills Afghan soldiers

KABUL — German soldiers traveling to the scene of a deadly firefight with Taliban insurgents accidentally killed six Afghan troops, the Afghan military said Saturday. Three Germans died in the firefight with the militants.

In the capital Kabul, the speaker of the lower house of parliament criticized President Hamid Karzai over an outburst Thursday in which he blamed the international community for the controversy over last year’s disputed presidential election.

Yunus Qanooni blasted Karzai’s claim of foreign interference in the drafting of the nation’s electoral law, which the president had sought to amend this week to expand his control over the country’s institutions.

“This is the house of the people and all the members have been elected,” Qanooni said. “It’s not possible that we would be influenced by foreigners.”

Karzai had already called U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday after the Obama administration expressed dismay at his remarks.

The German central command confirmed Friday’s friendly fire incident but put the number of Afghan casualties at five. The deaths occurred amid heavy fighting between German troops and militants near the northern city Kunduz.

The German military said German soldiers who were rushing from Kunduz to the scene of the fighting shortly after 7 p.m. Friday encountered two civilian vehicles and demanded that they stop. When they did not, a German armored personnel carrier opened fire on them, the statement said. The vehicles were later found to have been transporting Afghan troops and an investigation is pending, the military added.

Shortly before, German troops had been attacked while on a bridge-building and mine-clearing mission southwest of Kunduz city, formerly a relatively calm area in the north that has lately seen a rising level of insurgent violence.

Kunduz provincial government spokesman Muhboballuh Sayedi said Afghan commanders were meeting Saturday with coalition forces to discuss the incident. The Afghan Defense Ministry issued a statement condemning the incident and expressing condolences to families of the dead soldiers.

The commander of Afghan forces in northern Afghanistan, Gen. Murad Ani, said the vehicles attacked had been returning to base after resupplying army and police units dispatched at the request of the Germans.

One was an armored vehicle and both were clearly marked, said Ani, who visited the scene of the shooting Saturday morning along with officials from the police and intelligence services.

Ani said the incident occurred five miles from the battlefield and there was no fighting in the immediate area.

“I don’t know why these German troops fired on our soldiers,” he said, adding it wasn’t clear what warnings had been issued before firing commenced.

The German commander in northern Afghanistan, Brig. Gen. Frank Leidenberger, called Ani soon after the friendly fire incident to “express his profound dismay,” the German military said in a statement posted on its Web site Saturday.

Spokesman for the German Central Command Joerg Langer said troops had warned the oncoming vehicles but were unable to see who was inside because of failing light.

“We obviously regret this incident very much,” Langer told The Associated Press in Berlin. He declined to give further details citing the ongoing investigation.

The German military said Friday’s battle with militants continued until about 11:30 p.m. local time and German troops were still patrolling the area. The bodies of the three soldiers were to be repatriated to Germany on Saturday, it said.

Kunduz is one of the principal bases for the 4,300 German troops currently deployed in Afghanistan. The German parliament recently approved the deployment of 850 reinforcements.

The German presence has been controversial, particularly since a German-ordered airstrike in September on two tanker trucks that had been captured by the Taliban in Kunduz killed up to 142 people.

The head of Germany’s armed forces and the deputy defense minister stepped down in November in connection with the airstrike. Franz Josef Jung, who was defense minister at the time of the bombing, was forced to quit his new job as labor minister in December.

Growing Taliban influence in Kunduz has threatened a key military supply line that opened last year following painstakingly negotiations between neighboring counties and the United States.

The land route via Russia and Central Asia offers an alternative means of providing essential supplies to the 120,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan. Most supplies come in overland from Pakistan along a corridor that has been frequently attacked by militants.

Local officials say the Taliban are establishing a shadow government along the dilapidated road that could obstruct vital supplies carried in hundreds of trucks every week from reaching the military. It also raises the danger that the supplies could end up in militant hands as fodder for suicide attacks.

Elsewhere in Kunduz on Friday, an apparent rocket attack on an Afghan military base killed a small child and injured two women, the Afghan Interior Ministry reported. Another three civilians were killed in a pair of roadside bomb attacks in the eastern province of Khost, the ministry said.

NATO announced that a coalition soldier was killed by an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan on Friday. It was the fifth NATO fatality this month.

In the latest assassination of a government figure, gunmen opened fire and killed a deputy district police chief on his way to work in Baglan province, bordering Kunduz, the Interior Ministry said.

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Associated Press writer Juergen Baetz in Berlin and AP writers Christopher Bodeen and Slobodan Lekic in Kabul contributed to this report.