Two Italian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Friday by a bomb which exploded as their patrol vehicle travelled along a road southeast of Kabul. The two servicemen, identified as Lieutenant Manuel Fiorito and Sergeant Major Luca Polsinelli, died of their wounds after being airlifted to a nearby military hospital.
Four other soldiers were slightly injured by the blast.
It was not immediately clear whether the bomb was a mine or a home-made bomb detonated by remote control when the two Italian Puma armoured cars passed by. Friday's attack came less than a month after a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the base used by Italy's provisional reconstruction team in the northwestern city of Herat. That attack caused three Afghan deaths.
Last week a bomb attack in the southern Iraq city of Nassiriya killed three Italian soldiers.
Intelligence sources said on Friday that the attacks in Afghanistan and in Nassiriya cannot be considered a coincidence given the recent elections in Italy. They amount to "pressure on the new centre-left government to withdraw (Italian) military contingents," the sources said.
Premier-elect Romano Prodi has already said he will pull troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, as had been decided by the previous centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi.
In the wake of the recent attack in Nassiriya, some of Prodi's more leftwing allies have called for a pull-out by the summer. After Friday's blast in Afghanistan there were calls for a withdrawal from that country too. Prodi expressed his deep "sorrow" over the fresh deaths but gave no clear signal on his intentions as regards the peace-keeping force.
"The problem of the price paid by our soldiers for peace and stability is one of the country's biggest problems at the moment, possibly the biggest," he said. Asked about the possibility that the attacks were designed to make him pull troops out of Afghanistan, he said: "Afghanistan is a problem that I raised many months ago because the security situation there is very serious".
Prodi has so far given grudging backing to the Italian presence there.
On March 26, he was quoted as saying: "We're in Afghanistan on an international mandate. We have to stay. But the political situation is terrible. We have to think very hard."
Italy has some 1,400 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. About a thousand are in Kabul, where they are part of the ISAF international security assistance force, and the rest in Herat, where Italy's provincial reconstruction team is based. Friday's two victims took the number of Italian soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the start of the mission to five.
Italian troops in Iraq currently number about 2,600. Italy did not take part in the US-led invasion in 2003 but sent a contingent afterwards to help with peacekeeping and reconstruction.
