Dutch soldiers have used their weapons on 648 occasions since they began their mission in Afghanistan two years ago, the NRC reports at the weekend.

This is more than all the other Dutch foreign missions together since the Korean war, the paper says.
The defence department says it does not have figures on how many Taliban fighters have been killed by Dutch troops. ‘This is not a criterium that we consider relevant,’ army chief Dick Berlijn tells the paper in an interview.
Berlijn does however, admit that many more local people have died than expected. Official figures put the number of civilian deaths involving Dutch soldiers at 75.