Three US service members were killed and three wounded when a roadside bomb exploded Tuesday near the central Afghan city of Ghazni in an attack claimed by the Taliban, officials said.
An American civilian contractor also was wounded in what appeared to be the deadliest attack on US forces in Afghanistan in the past 17 months, according to the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.
The names of the fallen service members were being withheld for 24 hours after notification of their next of kin, according to Defense Department policy.
US military officials said the attack took place during a patrol near Ghazni, which has remained volatile since being overrun by the Taliban in August in a four-day siege that left over 100 people dead.
Mohammad Arif Noori, a spokesman for the Ghazni governor’s office, said an armored vehicle carrying US troops hit an improvised explosive device in the Shahbaz area, according to Reuters.
He said US Special Forces had been conducting operations with Afghan troops around Ghazni since Monday.
Tuesday’s deaths bring to 13 the number of US troops killed in Afghanistan in 2018, including five this month. Meanwhile, 107 have been wounded this year, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System.
More than 2,200 US soldiers have been killed in the country since the 2001 US-led invasion that toppled the Taliban regime.
On Saturday, US Army Sgt. Leandro A.S. Jasso, 25, of Leavenworth, Washington, was killed during combat operations in Afghanistan’s Nimruz province.
Jasso, a member of the elite Rangers who was on his third deployment to Afghanistan, was accidentally shot by an allied Afghan force during a battle with al-Qaeda, the NATO mission said.
On Nov. 3, Maj. Brent Taylor of the Utah National Guard was killed in a so-called “insider attack” by a rogue Afghan commando he was training in Kabul. Taylor was the mayor of Ogden, Utah.
In June 2017, an Afghan army soldier fatally shot three US troops in an “insider attack” claimed by the Taliban in the Achin district of the eastern Nangarhar province.
Ghazni, which sits on the main highway linking the capital Kabul with Kandahar, was overrun this year by a large Taliban force before it was driven off by Afghan and American troops.
Ghazni was the only one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces where parliamentary elections could not be held last month. Voting there has been postponed for a year.
About 14,000 US troops remain in Afghanistan as part of Resolute Support and a separate counter-terror mission involving special forces aimed against militant groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS.
US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is spearheading efforts to strike a peace deal with the Taliban before Afghanistan’s presidential election, which is scheduled for April 2019.
With Post wires