KABUL — Three American civilian contractors and an Afghan national were killed Thursday in a shooting incident at a military base attached to Kabul’s international airport, according to U.S. officials. A fourth American contractor was wounded in the attack.
It was unclear how the contractors were attacked. Suspicion fell immediately on a possible “insider attack” perpetrated by a member of the Afghan security forces, who also have access to the military base at the airport. An unidentified Afghan air force official told the Reuters news agency that the shooter was an Afghan soldier.
When asked whether the incident was an insider attack, a U.S. military spokesman, Col. Brian Tribus, declined to comment. He said there would be no further comments on the incident until the investigation was complete.
The sprawling base where the shooting occurred is protected by tall concrete blast walls and filled with hangars, office trailers and maintenance buildings. It is a hub for the coalition’s air operations, as well as the main base of the Afghan air force. As of last year, before the military drawdown, it was home to as many as 4,000 foreign military personnel and civilian contractors from more than a dozen nations, including many Americans. Top U.S. commanders spent much of their time there.
Insider attacks have long plagued the relationship between Afghan forces and their American and international allies, breaking down trust and reducing interaction between them. The assaults by rogue Afghan soldiers or police particularly rose in the last years of the NATO combat mission that formally ended in December. They reached record levels in 2012 when there were 37 such attacks that killed 51 people, including 32 U.S. troops, according to the Pentagon.
Since then, U.S. and coalition forces have tightened vetting procedures for Afghan security forces and required that all foreign troops be armed at all times. The efforts reduced the number of insider attacks, but they nevertheless remain a major concern.
The killings served as a reminder of the threats faced by the roughly 10,600 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of American contractors who remain in Afghanistan, mostly to train and advise Afghan security forces. Such tasks require close interaction with Afghans, and it remains to be seen whether the attacks will have an adverse impact or restrict such relationships.
“We can confirm that there was a shooting incident at North Kabul International Airport complex 29 January at approximately 6:40pm,” Tribus said in an emailed statement. “Three coalition contractors were killed as was an Afghan local national. This incident is under investigation.”
A U.S. Defense official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the contractors were all Americans and that the fourth one had been wounded.
In August, a gunman wearing an Afghan army uniform opened fire at a military training school near Kabul, killing U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene. He was the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be killed in 13 years of war in Afghanistan and the first general to be killed in the line of duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that prompted the United States to intervene militarily in Afghanistan, combining with Afghan resistance forces to topple the radical Islamist Taliban regime.
Virtually everyone on the base is armed. But that did not stop U.S. military officials from worrying about insider attacks during a flag-lowering ceremony in early December that marked the official end of the coalition’s combat mission. Before the ceremony, the officials warned journalists that if any rockets landed, or if anyone started shooting, to run and take cover.
With the U.S. military drawdown, civilian contractors have become more visible. Even though their numbers have also sharply decreased, thousands of contractors remain in Afghanistan, most of them based in Kabul.
As of mid-2014, about 17,400 U.S. citizens were working in Afghanistan as civilian contractors for the Defense Department, according to military figures reported by the website, Danger Zone Jobs. Other private contractors work for various international relief and development organizations. A year earlier, the Congressional Research Service put the number of Pentagon contractors at about 33,000.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for Thursday’s killings, which broke a roughly three-week lull in violence in the capital. In the last two months of 2014, the Taliban intensified its attacks in Kabul and other parts of the country, targeting foreigners as well as influential Afghans and symbols of government authority.
The shooting was the first suspected insider attack since U.S. and NATO forces formally terminated their combat mission in Afghanistan. Under an agreement with the Afghan government, the previous coalition force is being replaced by a follow-on mission dubbed “Resolute Support,” which began Jan. 1 and consists of about 12,000 mostly U.S. troops focused on training.
Earlier Thursday, a roadside bomb killed a police commander and three other people in eastern Laghman province, and a suicide bomber targeted the commander’s funeral later in the day, according to Afghan officials. They said 16 people, including four police officers and 12 civilians, were killed and 39 wounded when the bomber mingled with mourners in the town of Mihtarlam and detonated his explosives.