KABUL, Afghanistan -- A man wearing an Afghan army uniform killed a U.S. service member and an American civilian in the capital, Kabul, on Wednesday, NATO and an Afghan official said.
A NATO statement said another U.S. service member and two U.S. civilians were wounded in the attack and were in a stable condition.
"Anytime we lose a member of our team, it is deeply painful," the statement quoted General John Nicholson, commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. "Our sympathies go out to the families, loved ones, and the units of those involved in this incident."
Gen. Dawlat Waziri, spokesman for the Afghan defense ministry, said the attack took place about 11 a.m. inside a military base in the capital. The ministry had opened an investigation on the attack, he added.
The NATO statement said the attacker was later killed. It said the victims were conducting duties as part of the larger NATO mission to train and advise the Afghan security services and that an investigation was being conducted to determine the exact circumstances of the attack.
Such insider attacks caused enormous strain between Americans and Afghans at its peak in 2012, when 44 such attacks caused about 15 percent of the total coalition deaths that year. Since then, the number of attacks has dropped with the decrease in the number of coalition forces, which have drawn down to less than 10,000 troops.
In its proscribed role as an advisory force -- limits that have been increasingly stretched as Afghan forces have struggled to hold off Taliban offensives -- the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan has sustained 10 deaths so far this year. In May, two Romanian soldiers were shot and killed when two Afghan army recruits opened fire on them in southern Kandahar province.
Both attackers were later killed by other troops.
As the Afghan forces have taken the lead in the fighting, they have suffered casualties that many fear may not be sustainable. Over the past six months, the Afghan police and army suffered about 4,500 deaths and about 8,000 wounded.
With the war raging -- and becoming deadlier as it extends to urban areas -- civilian casualties also have remained at record numbers, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan said Wednesday. In the first nine months of the year, the mission documented 8,397 casualties, with 2,562 of them deaths.
The U.N. expressed particular concern about the rise in child casualties for three years straight, as well as the increase in the share of casualties caused by Afghan government forces. During the first nine months of the year, the U.N. recorded 2,461 child casualties, 639 of them deaths, which shows a 15 percent increase over the same period last year.
The Afghan government forces were responsible for 1,897 casualties, among them 623 deaths, which makes up 23 percent of the overall civilian casualties, the United Nations said. That is a 42 percent increase over the same period last year.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press and by Mujib Mashal, Jawad Sukhanyar and Fahim Abed of The New York Times.
A Section on 10/20/2016