French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned on Friday that Paris could withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan after four unarmed French troops were were killed by an Afghan soldier.
In the meantime, Sarkozy said France will temporarily suspend combat operations and training Afghan security forces in the country, according to AFP.
“The French army stands alongside its allies, but we cannot accept that a single one of our soldiers be wounded or killed by our allies, it’s unacceptable,” Sarkozy said, according to the news agency.
Adding further, “if security conditions are not clearly established, then the question of an early return of the French army will be asked,” he said.
The four French soldiers were killed by a rogue Afghan army member on a base near Kabul. If France withdraws its 3,600 soldiers, it could put NATO’s plans to withdraw from the country in jeopardy.
NATO and the U.S. plan to incrementally withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said his agency would launch an investigation into the incident, and he strongly denounced the situation.
“They were not armed. They were literally murdered by an Afghan soldier. We don’t yet know if it was a Taliban who infiltrated or if it was someone who decided to act for reasons as yet unknown,” Longuet said, reported AFP.
A secret government report obtained by the New York Times, published on Friday, discussed an increase in the number of attacks by Afghan soldiers on U.S. and coalition forces.
“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history),” the report states, according to the Times. It adds that NATO announcements on the matter “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.”
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in a statement that incidents of Afghan soldiers attacking coalition forces are isolated.
“Such tragic incidents are terrible and grab headlines, but they are isolated,” he said, pointing out that there are around 130,000 NATO troops serving with approximately 300,000 Afghan soldiers. “That takes a lot of trust among a lot of soldiers,” he added.
“We have the same goal. An Afghanistan that is responsible for its own security,” Rasmussen noted.
