A sombre milestone has been reached in the Afghanistan war after an American sailor became the 3000th member of the Nato coalition to lose his life. The United States Defence Department announced that a serviceman had died from "complications associated with a medical condition," becoming the 3,000th casualty according to a tally compiled by the broadcaster CNN.
Most of those who have lost their lives during the more than 10 years of Operation Enduring Freedom have been American -- 1,974 to date. British troops have suffered the second highest level of deaths among coalition of 28 nations, with 414 deaths.
Fatality number 3,000 was named as petty Officer 1st Class Ryan J Wilson, 26, of Shasta, California, who died in Manama, Bahrain, on May 20. The Defence Department said that he had been assigned to the US Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain, from where he had been supporting the mission in Afghanistan.