KABUL, Afghanistan — A British soldier who was helping to build new quarters for the Afghan National Army at a small base in southern Afghanistan was fatally shot by an Afghan soldier in the first insider attack of 2013, military officials said Tuesday.
The attacker, who struck on Monday evening, also shot and wounded six other British soldiers in the engineering regiment, three of them seriously, before being killed, Afghan and British officials said.
During the attack, which occurred at Camp Hazrat, a joint patrol base in the Nahr-e-Seraj District of Helmand Province, several Afghan soldiers were also shot at but were not wounded, said Maj. Gen. Sayed Maluk, the commanding general of the Afghan Army’s 215 Corps, in a statement to the British Forces Broadcasting Service, an arm of the British Defense Ministry.
“It was the British team that sustained injuries,” General Maluk said. “Unfortunately, they were engineering personnel and they were building billeting for the A.N.A.”
He said the Afghan Army was doing everything it could to prevent such attacks. Until 2011, insider attacks, also known as “green on blue” attacks, were a relatively minor problem for the Western military forces in Afghanistan.
But last year, 62 international troops and civilian contractors died in attacks by Afghan forces. Two additional attacks are still under investigation.
Many in the military see the escalation as a game changer that requires Western troops to stay at arm’s length from the Afghans they are supposed to be training and mentoring.
At one point late last summer, Gen. John R. Allen, the commander for international forces in Afghanistan, temporarily suspended joint patrols unless they were approved at the highest levels because of the risk.
Members of NATO units were required to carry weapons with a loaded magazine, and each unit assigned some troops as “guardian angels” to protect fellow soldiers from insider attacks during meetings with Afghans as well as on patrol.
The Afghan Defense Ministry overhauled its screening process for new recruits and rescreened those already deployed.
“Prior to this incident happening we have done almost everything that we can,” General Maluk said.
He said Afghan soldiers have been told by religious leaders inside the corps that the coalition forces “are not invaders, they are our friendly forces; they are not here to invade, but rather they are here to help us reconstruct this country.”
“But to them, the enemy is the enemy,” he said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for arranging the infiltration into the Afghan Army of the soldier responsible for Monday’s shooting.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yusuf, said that the attacker’s name was Mohammed Qasim and that Mr. Qasim had “fulfilled his blessed duty.”
Mr. Qasim, who was between 23 and 25 years old and was known as Sheik Mohammed by his fellow soldiers, was a reticent young man who came from eastern Afghanistan, said Col. Abdul Saboor, an officer with the 215 Corps.
The sequence of events that led to the attack are still unclear, but it seems that the attacker, Mr. Qasim, was on guard duty in a tower as punishment for an infraction and initially began shooting at his Afghan compatriots. It is not clear if Mr. Qasim intended to kill them or whether it was a ploy to draw the British troops closer so that he could target them more easily.
