Kabul, January 20: A man, described as an Afghan soldier, has killed four French troopers with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in northeastern Afghanistan.
A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the attacker as a man wearing an Afghan military uniform and said the incident took place at around 8:00 a.m. local time (0330 GMT) on Friday in the Tagab district of Kapisa Province — which is located some 800 kilometers (497 miles) northeast of the country’s capital Kabul.
He added that 16 others had suffered injuries during the incident.
The French government plans to withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan in 2014, by which time they hope to have transferred responsibility to Afghan government forces.
A total of 78 French soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October 2001, when the US-led invasion of the country took place, according to official figures released by the website icasualties.org.
Four-thousand French military forces reportedly support the US-led operations in Afghanistan.
President Nicholas Sarkozy has come under pressure from the opposition Socialists to accelerate the withdrawal.
The security situation has been deteriorating across Afghanistan over the past few years.
Violence has also spread from Afghanistan’s volatile south to relatively peaceful areas over the course of the past year, despite the presence in the country of some 150,000 foreign troops.
—-Agencies