Eight Afghan Police Killed in Insider Attack

Afghan police have once again fallen victim to an insider attack, this time in the Faryab Province, where a police checkpoint was wiped out when one of the assigned officers, now believed to be Taliban infiltrator, killed the rest of the police.

The Taliban have not claimed responsibility for this most recent incident, but officials say that eight police were drugged by the infiltrator, and then were all killed. The attacker left after killing everyone else, and is believed to have rejoined the Taliban, taking all the weapons with him.

The attacker in this case has not been named, but was described as having joined the police a year ago. The huge Afghan security forces have kept recruiting standards extremely low, which has made it trivial for rebels to join the security forces, whether to carry out attacks or just to get free weapons and training before defecting.

This has been a recurring problem in Afghanistan, with Afghan troops so prone to being enemy gunmen that NATO radically revised their rules in recent years to limit contact with them. Such killings happen several times annually, and the attackers are rarely caught.