SISAY OUTPOST, Afghanistan — The details of an insider shooting that happened Sept. 29 near this small Afghan army outpost in eastern Afghanistan underscore the escalating distrust that surrounds interactions between U.S. and Afghan troops. The attack devolved into a rare melee that led U.S. soldiers to shoot at some Afghan soldiers who insisted they were not involved in any insider killing. After 35 minutes of gunfire and grenade explosions, two Americans and ultimately four Afghans died; three Americans and two Afghans were wounded; and the coalition had experienced one of the most corrosive insider attacks of the war.
"Something like this is fairly traumatic, and we want to stop it from affecting future operations," said one senior official with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. "But there's also the recognition that talk can't fix everything."
Afghan soldiers caught up in the fighting say the relationship between the two forces now seems more starkly distant.
"We cannot be their friends, because they do not speak our language," said Redi Gul, 28, a soldier whose back was burned raw as he tried to escape from his outpost after it was set ablaze by U.S. gunfire and grenades.
The fighting unfolded near the outpost, known as Sisay, along a bad stretch of highway near the mouth of the Tangi Valley in eastern Afghanistan's rugged Wardak province. The Taliban is never far away here: Roadside bombs pit the asphalt every mile or so, and insurgent attacks occur almost daily against army and police convoys and traveling fuel tankers.
On the day of the attack, a U.S. unit drove up unannounced and began taking biometric readings of drivers passing the checkpoint. The impression, the Afghans say, was that they were not trusted enough to do the job or even receive a bit of notice that the Americans would be working with them — an upsetting breach of field etiquette, said Capt. Abdul Khaliq, the Afghan captain here.
"We were newly introduced to this company about seven or eight months ago, but we haven't sat down together at all," he said.
U.S. officials dispute this and say the two units were acquainted.
One Afghan soldier named Yusuf came down to the checkpoint with a cup of tea for the Americans' interpreter and then returned to the outpost, according to the Afghan account. Moments later, an Afghan soldier who had already been at the checkpoint, a Tajik from Baghlan province named Din Muhammad, raised his gun and fired, killing Sgt. 1st Class Daniel T. Metcalfe, 29, and wounding another American near him, according to the U.S. account of the violence.
U.S. soldiers positioned nearby as guards for the force, known as "guardian angels," responded, shooting and killing Din Muhammad. They and U.S. soldiers in nearby vehicles then saw a man in an Afghan army uniform behind the Afghan outpost up the hill. The man began firing, they said, killing an American civilian with the force and wounding two other soldiers.
The U.S. soldiers believed that they wounded that gunman but that fire was also coming from the Afghan outpost itself, said an ISAF official who described parts of an as-yet-unreleased report on the attack to a reporter for The New York Times.
For Gul, who said he and his Afghan comrades were inside the outpost drinking tea, the first evidence that something was wrong was when a hail of fire struck the base. They were scrambling for their rifles when a grenade set the outpost on fire.
He saw Yusuf running past him out of the outpost but lost sight of him. It was only then that it dawned on him that it was the Americans who were gunning them down.
"We did not fire a single shot," Gul said. "We didn't know who to shoot at. A second grenade hit the outpost and blew up. There was some ammo that caught fire and started exploding."
The Americans saw Yusuf running and shot him, unsure whether he was trying to escape or attack. Then there was more confusion: The Afghan and U.S. soldiers say fire began coming from a mountain ridgeline behind the outpost.
The Afghan soldiers said they were caught in a crossfire after Taliban fighters seemingly had decided to join the fray. Later, Afghan soldiers said they found bullets from a PK machine gun, a weapon used locally only by the Taliban, embedded in the barriers around the outpost.
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