NATO officials are admitting tonight that they killed four Afghan soldiers in an air strike in the restive Helmand Province. The attack does not appear to have been precipitated by any clashes.
Rather, NATO spotted the soldiers not far from their base and assumed that they were militants, ordering in an air strike that killed four of them. Officials are promising an investigation into the killings but would not provide any additional details.
The killings come just a day after NATO admitted that another air strike in Helmand Province had accidentally hit a group of civilians, killing one and wounding two children on the outskirts of the village of Marjah.
Both incidents point to the reality of the massive increase in air strikes in recent months, that officials are getting extremely trigger happy as they get more and more desperate to try to accomplish something, and that all it is managing to accomplish is more civilian casualties and more “friendly fire” incidents.