8 U.S.-hired Afghans die in ambush

KABUL, Afghanistan — Eight Afghan men heading to work at a U.S. base Thursday morning were pulled from their car by insurgents, marched to a nearby village and shot in the head, Afghan officials said.

Neither the Taliban nor other insurgent groups claimed responsibility for the killings. But insurgents have for years warned their countrymen not to work for the United States and its allies or for the Afghan government and they have periodically backed up their warnings with violence.

Government officials are a more frequent target, along with Afghan soldiers and police officers. But, as the killings Thursday showed, civilians who work for the coalition are not immune.

The men were killed about a half-mile from Forward Operating Base Shank, a sprawling outpost in Logar province, which abuts Kabul and has emerged as a central battleground in the fight to keep the capital secure from the Taliban.

The eight men, who were in their late teens and early 20s, were temporary laborers on their way to do odd jobs at Shank, which is shared by U.S. and Afghan forces, said Rais Khan Abdulrahimzai, the deputy police chief of Logar.

Like most coalition bases, Shank employs many Afghans, most of them in low-level construction, maintenance and service jobs. The paychecks earned often support extended families, especially in rural Afghanistan, where wage-paying jobs are scarce and poverty is often the norm.

Abdulrahimzai said the men had made a crucial mistake Thursday morning: They had left for work too early, about 6 a.m. It is usually another hour before the Afghan army and police have cleared the road of improvised bombs laid in the night and set up checkpoints intended to keep the Taliban from targeting motorists.

But without the army and police along the road, four fighters on motorcycles were able to accost the eight men as they drove toward Shank, Abdulrahimzai said.

The insurgents forced the car off the road and marched the eight laborers a few hundred feet to a village. The men were lined up and killed with shots to the head, Abdulrahimzai said.

Wali Wakil, the chief of Logar’s provincial council, said the grief over the killings was compounded by the fact they had taken place during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

“God knows how their families feel,” he said. “They could have waited a bit and tried to go to work a bit late, when the army forces would have been” on the road.