NATO official: 2 US troops missing in eastern Afghanistan

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2 American troops missing in eastern Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two U.S. troops are missing in eastern Afghanistan, a military official said Saturday. An Afghan official said one may have been killed and the other captured by the Taliban.

Also Saturday, five American troops died in bombings in the south where international forces are stepping up the fight against the insurgents.

The two missing service members had left their compound the previous day in Kabul and did not return, a NATO statement said. It did not identify the pair by nationality, but U.S. officials said they were American.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The military dispatched vehicles and rotary-winged aircraft to search for the two and their vehicle.

Samer Gul, district chief of Charkh district in Logar province, said that a four-wheel drive armored vehicle was seen Friday night by a guard working for the district chief’s office. The guard tried to flag down the vehicle, carrying a driver and a passenger, but it kept going, Gul said.

“They stopped in the main bazaar of Charkh district. The Taliban saw them in the bazaar,” Gul said. “They didn’t touch them in the bazaar, but notified other Taliban that a four-wheel vehicle was coming their way.”

The second group of Taliban tried to stop the vehicle, but when it didn’t, insurgents opened fire and the two occupants in the vehicle shot back, he said.

NATO said a search is under way for the missing service members. According to Gul, one may have been killed and the other taken hostage by the Taliban.

“Maybe they wanted to go to Paktia province or to the American base, but they came down the wrong road toward Charkh,” Gul said. “They didn’t pay any attention to the police. Otherwise we could have kept them from going into an insecure area and now this unfortunate incident has happened.”

Military officials could not confirm the district chief’s account.

The only U.S. service member known to be in Taliban captivity is Spc. Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho, who disappeared June 30, 2009 in Paktika province of eastern Afghanistan. He has since appeared on videos posted on Taliban websites confirming his captivity.

Mohammad Nasir Medaruz, director of a radio station in Logar called Meli Pegham, or “national message,” said he had received a phone call from coalition officials asking that he broadcast a message offering $10,000 for information about the whereabouts of each missing service member.

“I told them that Logar is not a safe area and if I broadcast that, I could get attacked,” Medaruz said.

He said that if the military officials paid him, he would broadcast the information and say that it was an “advertisement.”

He said he did not broadcast the information, but another radio station, sponsored by the military in Logar, did air the message.

On Saturday in the same district in Logar, the manager of an Afghan construction company and his driver were kidnapped, according to Din Mohammad Darwesh, spokesman for the governor of Logar province. The two Afghans captured worked with Afghan Korean Construction Co., he said.

Meanwhile, the five service members died in roadside bombings — four in a single blast, NATO said in a statement without specifying nationalities nor providing further details. A fifth service member was killed in a separate attack in the south, NATO said.

U.S. officials confirmed all five were Americans. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity under rules regarding casualty identification.

The latest deaths bring to 75 the number of international troops killed in Afghanistan this month, including 56 Americans.

The U.S.-led force is ramping up operations against the Taliban in their southern strongholds, hoping to enable the Afghan government to expand its control in the volatile region. Rising casualty tolls, however, are eroding support for the war even as President Barack Obama has sent thousands of reinforcements to try to turn back the Taliban.

On Tuesday, an international conference in Kabul endorsed President Hamid Karzai’s plan for Afghan security forces to assume responsibility for protecting the country by the end of 2014. Obama has pledged to begin removing U.S. troops starting in July 2011, although he has linked the drawdown to security conditions on the ground.

In other violence Saturday, the Afghan Interior Ministry reported that five Afghan civilians were killed by a bomb in the Chora district of Uruzgan province. A total of seven militants had died in clashes with Afghan and international forces since Friday night in the provinces of Khost, Uruzgan and Kunar, the ministry added without giving further details.

Four suspected insurgents were captured in two raids late Friday on Taliban hide-outs in Baghlan province of northern Afghanistan, NATO said.

Elsewhere, NATO said it was looking into conflicting reports of civilian casualties following a battle between international troops and Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan.

In Kandahar, a man named Abdul Ghafaar said he took seven children to the city’s Mirwais hospital after getting caught in crossfire Friday between NATO and Taliban forces in Sangin, a flashpoint town in neighboring Helmand province.

Another man, Marjan Agha, said that he also brought injured people from Sangin and that the fight started Friday afternoon after civilians were caught between coalition and insurgent fighters. He said villagers began walking with a white flag toward NATO forces but shots rang out and two people were killed on the spot.

The NATO-led command said it was aware of reports of civilian casualties in Sangin, but said in a statement that it had “no operational reporting that correlates to this alleged incident.”

In the north, Afghan security forces conducted an operation Saturday in the Dara-e-suf district where five road construction workers were attacked on Thursday, said Abdul Samad, deputy police chief in Samangan province. He said two Afghans working for a road construction company were released by militants, but that three other workers from Bangladesh were kidnapped.

He said that non-governmental groups and private companies are urged to tell the police when they are going to be in the area, but that the road workers did not tell the local police that they would be monitoring the road being constructed between Mazer-e-Sharif and Dara-e-suf district.

Associated Press Writers Mirwais Khan in Kandahar and Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.