KABUL – US and Afghan troops repelled attackers wearing American uniforms and suicide vests in a pair of simultaneous assaults before dawn Saturday on NATO bases near the Pakistani border, including one where seven CIA employees died in a suicide attack last year. The raids appear part of an insurgent strategy to step up attacks in widely scattered parts of the country as the US focuses its resources on the battle around the Taliban's southern birthplace of Kandahar. Also Saturday, three more American service members were killed — two in a bombing in the south and the third in fighting in eastern Afghanistan, the US command said. That brought to 38 the number of US troops killed this month — well below last month's figure of 66. The militant assault in the border province of Khost began about 4 a.m. when dozens of insurgents stormed Forward Operating Base Salerno and nearby Camp Chapman with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, according to NATO and Afghan police. Two attackers managed to breach the wire protecting Salerno but were killed before they could advance far onto the base, NATO said. Twenty-one attackers were killed — 15 at Salerno and six at Chapman — and five were captured, it said. Three more insurgents, including a commander, were killed in an airstrike as they fled the area, NATO said. The Afghan Defense Ministry said two Afghan soldiers were killed and three wounded in the fighting. Four US troops were wounded, NATO officials said. US and Afghan officials blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based faction of the Taliban with close ties to al-Qaida. Camp Chapman was the scene of the Dec. 30 suicide attack that killed the seven CIA employees. Afghan police said about 50 insurgents took part in the twin assaults. After being driven away from the bases, the insurgents approached the nearby offices of the governor and provincial police headquarters but were also scattered, said Khost provincial police Chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai. "Given the size of the enemy's force, this could have been a major catastrophe for Khost. Luckily we prevented it," he said. Small-arms fire continued through the morning, while NATO helicopters patrolled overhead. The dead were wearing US Army uniforms, which can be easily purchased in shops in Kabul and other cities, possibly pilfered from military warehouses. The twin attacks appeared to be part of a growing pattern of insurgent assaults far from the southern battlefields of Kandahar and Helmand provinces, which have been the main focus of the US military campaign. Last December, President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan, most to the Kandahar area where the Islamist movement was organized in the mid-1990s.
