A U.S. service member was killed in Afghanistan on Saturday, officials with NATO’s Resolute Support mission to the country said in a press release.
U.S. officials did not immediately respond to questions regarding the service member’s cause of death or where in the country the death occurred.
The name of the deceased service member will be released 24 hours after their next of kin has been notified.
Additional information will be released as appropriate, officials said in their statement.
According to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, nine U.S. military members, not including this latest casualty, have been killed and 95 have been wounded in Afghanistan so far in 2018.
The latest death comes on the heels of a new report released by the Department of Defense inspector general saying there has been little progress toward reconciliation between the Afghan government and Taliban militants.
“In public statements, diplomatic and military leaders emphasized that progress towards the goals of the South Asia strategy is being made,” the report said. “However, progress towards peace remains elusive. This quarter, 65 percent of the Afghan population lived in areas under government control or influence, a figure that has not changed in the past year."
Attacks in which a soldier in an Afghan police or military uniform uses his weapon on coalition troops also appear to have risen this year. There have been four insider attacks in 2018, according to archived press releases on NATO’s Resolute Support website.
That is compared to no insider attacks in 2017, one in 2016 and two in 2015, the year the Resolute Support mission began.
Gen. Scott Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was present during an insider attack that killed a key Afghan general and wounded an American one-star general on Oct. 18.
Miller gave an interview to NBC News about two weeks after the attack, saying the war in Afghanistan does not have a military solution.
“This is not going to be won militarily,” Miller said. “This is going to a political solution."
“My assessment is the Taliban also realizes they cannot win militarily,” he said. "So if you realize you can’t win militarily at some point, fighting is just, people start asking why. So you do not necessarily wait us out, but I think now is the time to start working through the political piece of this conflict.”
Kyle Rempfer was an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.
