Taliban attack Prince Harry’s Afghan base

Taliban insurgents attacked the U.S.-led coalition’s main base in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province where Britain’s Prince Harry is based, killing two service members, after vowing revenge for the inflammatory video that has sparked violent protests across the Middle East.

Friday’s incident at Camp Bastion in southern Helmand province also left others wounded, US officials said, without offering details on the nationalities of the wounded.

Camp Bastion is a British airbase and is adjacent to Camp Leatherneck, the main base for the US Marine Corps in Helmand.

A defence official in Washington said the two dead were US marines, speaking on condition of anonymity, while another US official described the attack as “complex”, meaning it was a co-ordinated strike using several types of weapons.

The attack, involving small arms and mortar or rocket fire, started around midnight local time, Master Sergeant Bob Barko of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) told AFP news agency.

Another ISAF spokesman said the assault was over but details including the number of attackers and whether they managed to penetrate the base were not immediately clear.

Prince Harry, 27, has been deployed at Camp Bastion as a military helicopter pilot.

According to Smith, the Taliban also claimed that the prince was a target in Friday’s attack.

In 2008, he was hastily withdrawn from Afghanistan when a news blackout surrounding his deployment, on the ground directing aircraft in attacks on Taliban positions, was broken.

This time, however, the military has released photographs and video of him in Afghanistan from the start. Britain’s defence ministry said any risk “has been, and will continue to be, assessed”.

NATO has about 117,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban alongside government forces.

Most of the NATO troops are set to withdraw by the end of 2014 in a US-designed transition process that will put Afghan security forces in charge of security for their war-battered country.

Helmand, in the troubled south, was the focus of a 30,000-strong troop surge announced by the US in 2009 designed to quell the Taliban-led fight once and for all.