Insurgents launched pre-dawn attacks Saturday on a major NATO base in eastern Afghanistan and a nearby camp where seven CIA employees were killed last year in a suicide bombing. NATO said there were no coalition casualties and the attacks were repelled.
It said 13 insurgents were killed — four of whom were wearing suicide vests — and five captured.
The assaults on the sprawling Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province and nearby Camp Chapman came around 3 a.m., just as area residents were rising for early morning prayers.
The area, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Kabul near the border with Pakistan, is a hotbed of activity by the Taliban and other insurgent groups, including the December attack on Chapman that killed four CIA officers and three contracted security guards.
Afghan police said about 50 insurgents attacked using rifles, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, but had been repelled.
Khost provincial police Chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai said they found the bodies of 14 militants outside Salerno and five others had been captured alive. He said police believed the bodies of more insurgents would be found.
After being driven away from the bases, the insurgents approached the nearby offices of the governor and provincial police headquarters but were driven off, Ishaqzai said."Given the size of the enemy's force, this could have been a major catastrophe for Khost. Luckily we prevented it," he said.
Small arms fire could still be heard in the area at midmorning, while NATO helicopters patrolled overhead.
Police captured a pickup truck laden with ammunition along with a light truck packed with explosives that had become stuck in deep mud, according to Maj. Wazir Pacha of the provincial police headquarters. Bomb specialists were preparing to defuse explosives aboard the truck, which had been booby-trapped, he said.
NATO said the dead insurgents were members of the Haqqani Network, a group with deep ties to al-Qaida accused of launching frequent raids across the border from neighboring Pakistan.
Three of the insurgents were killed in an airstrike on a truck in which they were fleeing the attack on Salerno, including Mudasir, a senior Haqqani explosives expert suspected of arranging suicide bomb attacks, NATO said.
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