{"id":1424,"date":"2018-02-21T13:30:29","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T13:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2018-02-21T13:30:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T13:30:29","slug":"taliban-infiltrator-kills-16-afghan-militia-fighters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/2018\/02\/21\/taliban-infiltrator-kills-16-afghan-militia-fighters\/","title":{"rendered":"Taliban infiltrator kills 16 Afghan militia fighters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Al-Jazeera<\/p>\n

A\u00a0Taliban<\/a>\u00a0infiltrator has killed 16 pro-government militia fighters in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The attacker had been fighting alongside the militia for months before turning his gun on them on Saturday night, at a checkpoint in the Gereshk district.<\/p>\n

“We know that a Taliban fighter killed 16 militiamen fighting alongside government forces, but who these forces belong to, we don’t know yet,” a spokesman for Helmand’s governor told Reuters news agency on Monday.<\/p>\n

Local media said the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The attacker managed to join the armed group after fleeing the checkpoint with weapons,\u00a0TOLOnews reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Large swaths of Afghanistan’s Helmand province –\u00a0the country’s opium production hub -are currently under control of the Afghan Taliban.<\/p>\n

‘Green on blue’<\/strong><\/h2>\n

So-called green-on-blue attacks – where Afghan soldiers or police with Taliban sympathies turn their guns on colleagues – have been a major problem for Afghan and foreign forces.<\/p>\n

Last June, three\u00a0US<\/a>\u00a0soldiers were fatally shot and a fourth was wounded in eastern\u00a0Afghanistan<\/a>\u00a0by an Afghan army soldier.<\/p>\n

The killings have bred fierce mistrust between local and foreign forces, even as the rate of such incidents has dropped in recent years.<\/p>\n

Such attacks are sometimes planned by the Taliban, but, mostly, they are caused by minor disagreements between the two sides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Al-Jazeera A\u00a0Taliban\u00a0infiltrator has killed 16 pro-government militia fighters in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1425,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}