NATO troops killed in Afghanistan attack

Two NATO soldiers have been killed and six others wounded in a rocket attack on their base in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Kunar, an Afghan official with NATO forces has said.
“Two ISAF soldiers were killed and six others injured in a Taliban rocket attack on an ISAF base in Nari district today,” a local spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Friday.
Two other local officials confirmed the account, while the ISAF press office in the capital Kabul said “two service members died following an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan”.
Al Jazeera’s Jennifer Glasse, reporting from Kabul, said: “We understand the attack happened in the early morning hours in the Kunar province, that’s in Nari district near the Afghan border.
“Senior Afghan officials claim that that rocket attack came from Pakistani soil, and that would be quite significant because the border region has been quite sensitive,” she said.
ISAF has about 130,000 soldiers fighting alongside around 350,000 Afghan security personnel against the Taliban.
They are due to pull out of the country in 2014, and details of the process will be worked out at a NATO summit in Chicago starting on Sunday.
The latest attack came a day after gunmen dressed in Afghan police uniforms and wearing suicide vests stormed a government compound in the southwestern province of Farah, killing seven people and wounding 12 others.
The Taliban earlier this month announced the start of their annual spring offensive, a campaign of bombings and attacks that picks up every year as the weather warms.
In another incident, three civilians were killed in the Watapur district of the eastern province when a mortar shell landed on a civilian household.
Another six were injured after what officials say was a Taliban-fired mortar landed on the house.
Syed Fazlullah Wahidi, Kunar provincial governor, told the Pajhwok news agency the injured, four children and two women, were transported to the Kunar civil hospital.
So far this year, 154 NATO service members have been killed during the fighting, the AP news agency reported.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies