Four American soldiers have been killed in an insurgent attack on the Bagram U.S. airbase in Afghanistan just hours after NATO forces transferred responsibility for the security of the entire country to Afghan security forces for the first time since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, media reports citing U.S. officials said early on Wednesday.
The officials were quoted as saying that the soldiers were killed after they were hit by "indirect fire" from insurgents at Bagram air base, located close to the Afghan capital Kabul. Incidentally, Bagram is the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan.
According to media estimates, the latest fatalities take the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year to 91, with the United States topping the list with 69 deaths.
Notably, the attack on Bagram came just hours after the White House announced that the Taliban has agreed to hold direct peace talks with the U.S. over the future of Afghanistan. Taliban reportedly agreed to the talks after the U.S. dropped a series of preconditions it had set earlier for any negotiations with the insurgent group.
Media reports suggested that the talks between U.S. officials and Taliban may begin as early as this week in Qatar's capital Doha, where the Taliban have just opened their first official overseas office. They added that those negotiations may be followed by a meeting between the Taliban and the High Peace Council in Qatar.
"The core of the process is not going to be U.S.-Taliban talks. The core of it is going to be negotiation among Afghans and the level of trust on both sides is, as one would expect, extremely low," an unnamed senior U.S. official was quoted as saying by the media.
Currently, there are over 97,000 foreign troops from more than 48 countries in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the war-ravaged South Asian country. The U.S. continues to be the single biggest contributor to the ISAF, with 68,000 soldiers on the ground.
The bulk of the foreign forces are expected to remain in Afghanistan until the planned withdrawal of the entire coalition troops by end of 2014. With the transfer of the country's security responsibility to the Afghan security forces on Tuesday, foreign troops will now limit their activities to supporting combat operations when requested; training Afghan forces; and providing helicopters to take out casualties.
Although NATO and its member-states have welcomed the transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan forces as a major milestone in Afghanistan's future development, there are widespread concerns about the ability of Afghan security forces to counter Taliban insurgency without foreign military assistance.
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