KABUL, Afghanistan - On the eve of the final "fighting season" before the major pullout of American troops from Afghanistan begins, U.S. deaths here have fallen to their lowest levels in five years.
The decline is even steeper for international forces: The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force suffered its fewest troops killed in December, January and February in seven years.
U.S. deaths in those months this winter totaled 17, down from 57 last winter.
As of Friday, a Marine who died in Helmand province on Feb. 22 was the only U.S. service member to be killed in 43 days, the longest such stretch since the winter of 2006-07, according to records kept by iCasualties.org, which tracks deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The main reason for the drop in deaths among the coalition troops, military leaders say, is that Afghan security forces have reached nearly full strength and increasingly are taking the lead in fighting insurgents.
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Also, measures taken to stop so-called insider attacks by Afghan soldiers and police officers on their foreign allies apparently have been effective.
Such insider attacks reached a deadly crescendo last summer, and there were 47 attacks last year, which caused 62 deaths, according to the ISAF. But there have been just two such deaths in nearly four months: a British soldier who was killed in early January and an American civilian contractor whom an Afghan policewoman shot in December.
"There has certainly been an improvement in the past six months and we feel like those countermeasures have been effective, though it's of course too early to make a final judgment," said German Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz, the spokesman for the international forces in Afghanistan.
The reduction in the number of international forces here also probably had an effect, Katz said.
US Toll in Afghanistan
2,048
Deaths
18,299
Wounded
Source: Department of Defense.
