Taliban slay 10 aid workers
KABUL, Afghanistan – Taliban fighters gunned down a 10-member international medical team, including six Americans, in the wilds of northern Afghanistan, the aid group and local officials said Saturday, in an ambush that highlighted the growing dangers faced by foreign charity organizations in the country.
The 10 aid workers, who also included two Afghans, a German and a Briton, were attacked in a remote forested area of Badakhshan province as they were returning from a mission to provide eye care to rural villagers, according to provincial police and the International Assistance Mission, the Kabul-based group that organized the trip.
The ambush was one of the deadliest strikes against foreign aid workers in the nearly nine-year Afghanistan war. It also represented the largest toll for U.S. civilians working in the country since a suicide bomber killed seven members of a CIA team at a base in eastern Afghanistan in December.
The Taliban increasingly have targeted foreign aid workers, whom it views as collaborators with the Western military. Last month, gunmen and suicide bombers stormed the offices of the U.S.-based development group DAI in Kunduz province, also in Afghanistan’s north, killing at least five people.
Violence in Afghanistan has burgeoned this year, with Afghan civilians and Western troops suffering record numbers of deaths.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the deaths, saying those killed were spies and preachers of Christianity. The details provided in statements by spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid suggested that the killers were insurgents and not bandits, who also roam freely in the area.
Mujahid said insurgents encountered the group in the Kiran Munjan district of Badakhshan and tried to arrest them on suspicion of spying.
“But they tried to escape, then mujahedeen attacked and killed all of them on the spot,” he said by telephone.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, could not confirm the nationalities of the six who were listed by the group as Americans, but spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said there was “reason to believe that several American citizens are among the deceased.”
The charity’s executive director, Dirk Frans, said the group was still awaiting positive identification of the bodies but that the police description matched that of its workers and their vehicles. Three of the team members were women, he said.
The dead apparently included the medical team’s leader, Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, N.Y., who had been with the organization since its early days, Frans said.
Afghan associates in Kabul described the team as dedicated and caring.
“He had worked here for decades, opening clinics all over Afghanistan,” Mohammed Yousef Barakai, the head of the group’s eye hospital in Kabul, said of Little. “He only wanted to help the Afghan people.”