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Afghan Soldier Opens Fire on Coalition

By JONATHAN FOWLER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; 7:05 AM

KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan soldier opened fire on a coalition convoy at a checkpoint southern Afghanistan, killing one Romanian soldier and wounding another convoy member before escaping, a senior Afghan military commander said Wednesday.

The commander, Gen. Said Mohammad, said the attacker was a veteran Afghan soldier who had acted alone Tuesday while other Afghan soldiers guarding the checkpoint were preparing a meal nearby to break their daily fast during the Ramadan holiday.

Mohammad said Taliban and al-Qaida were not involved in the attack on the Romanians.

But a Taliban spokesman, Mullah Abdullah Zabulwal, claimed responsibility for that attack and for a car bomb that exploded near two United Nations offices in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, on Tuesday, wounding two people.

Zabulwal, who spoke with The Associated Press by telephone from an unidentified location in Afghanistan, would not discuss the soldier involved in the Romanian assault, saying only that the men who had carried out both attacks had returned to their hideouts safely.

"We had warned Afghans not to work for Western aid organizations or U.N. agencies because they are spying for America," Zabulwal said.

In other developments:

-Three U.S. servicemen were injured in separate fighting Monday in southern Afghanistan;

-American and Afghan soldiers continued their military operation in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday aimed at tracking insurgents in a remote mountainous region.

-The U.S. military dismissed as untrue a television report that nine Americans had been killed in a clash earlier this month in Afghanistan. The Arab satellite TV station Al-Arabiya on Tuesday broadcast what it said was footage of a Taliban attack on a U.S. patrol. "We haven't had nine Americans lost in any incident in two years," said U.S. military spokesman Col. Rodney Davis Davis. "It's absolutely not true. False. A lie."

The attack on the Romanian convoy was first reported by government officials in Bucharest, who identified the fatality as Sgt. Maj. Iosif Silviu Fogorasi, 33, and said another Romanian soldiers also were wounded.

Romania, a former communist country, has 450 troops serving in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Gen. Mohammad said the attack occurred when five Romanian armored cars were stopped at a roadblock about 50 miles east of Kandahar city while returning from Spin Boldak town near the Pakistan border.

Earlier reports had said the Romanians returned fire and killed the assailant, but Mohammad said the attacking Afghan soldier, who was not immediately named, fled the scene.

On Wednesday, in Kabul, military spokesman Col. Rodney Davis said the coalition's Operation Mountain Resolve in eastern Afghanistan won't stop until a terror network in the region bordering Pakistan is destroyed.

"We don't have a timetable," Davis said at a news conference in Kabul. "If they decide to give up tomorrow, we'll stop tomorrow."

Attacks against coalition forces and international relief agencies have increased lately in southern Afghanistan, the area where the support base of Taliban was located in the city of Kandahar before the militia was defeated two years ago by a U.S.-led invasion.

On Tuesday, a car bomb exploded outside two U.N. aid offices in Kandahar, wounding an Afghan U.N. guard and an Afghan civilian nearby. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Kandahar's police chief blamed Taliban and al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

Davis said three U.S. special forces soldiers in the coalition were slightly wounded by shrapnel during an hour-long clash with several enemy combatants in the southeastern Paktika province, close to the Pakistan border, on Monday.

Their names were being withheld for privacy, Davis said Wednesday.