KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - NATO officials ordered a British military blog entry pulled down Monday after it reported that Canadians and Americans were among more than a dozen coalition troops wounded in a Taliban rocket attack at Kandahar Airfield.
The Helmand Blog, run by several branches of the U.K. military both in England and Afghanistan, said insurgents attacked the base from two locations Saturday night, injuring 13 people from American and Canadian military contingents.
The blog quoted Senior Aircraftsman Eric Telford, 24, from 2nd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, as saying he rushed to the site of the attack and applied a tourniquet to a wounded female Canadian soldier.
Hours later, the entry was yanked after the International Security Assistance Force said it was posted without approval and contained some incorrect information.
"The information concerning wounded -- numbers and nationalities -- was inaccurate," ISAF spokesman Capt. Scott Costen said in an email. "It was also released contrary to ISAF policy."
Costen declined to provide the correct information.
The Canadian Forces also has a policy against releasing information about wounded troops because it does not want insurgents to link the number of injuries with any specific incident. Instead, statistics on wounded soldiers are released once a year.
ISAF said a small number of insurgents were involved in Saturday's attack, one of whom was killed and three of whom were detained.
No one was killed during the four-hour assault, in which insurgents fired at least five rockets and mortars at the heavily fortified base. But ISAF said some civilians and members of NATO military forces were injured.
None of the militants breached the base, which is the main NATO installation in southern Afghanistan and home to an estimated 30,000 coalition personnel.
For security reasons, journalists at Kandahar Airfield are prevented from reporting where the rockets landed -- it's part of their embedment agreement with the military.
The Associated Press, however, reported one of the rockets hit a shop-lined boardwalk where soldiers socialize in the evenings. It also reported that a U.S. official said the rocket hit about 50 metres away from a restaurant in front of a boardwalk coffee shop.
The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been officially released.
Isolated rocket attacks are commonplace at the base, but they are often wildly inaccurate. Ground attacks such as the one Saturday night, however, are rare.
It was the third major assault on NATO's military hubs in Afghanistan in six days.
A Taliban suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy in Kabul last Tuesday, killing 18 people including Col. Geoff Parker, the highest-ranking Canadian soldier to die in the Afghan mission to date. Five U.S. servicemen also died. Seven Afghans have been arrested in connection with that bombing.
Then on Wednesday, dozens of Taliban militants attacked the main U.S. military base -- Bagram Airfield -- killing an American contractor in fighting that lasted more than eight hours. Nine others were wounded.
Kandahar Airfield has become the launching pad for additional U.S. forces pouring into the country for a summer surge against the Taliban.
The attack Saturday came two weeks after the Taliban announced a spring offensive against NATO forces and Afghan government troops -- their response to a promise by U.S. President Barack Obama to flush the Taliban out of their strongholds in the Kandahar province.
