My soldier son died in Afghanistan

The mother of a Scottish soldier killed in Afghanistan has described Donald Trump’s claim that allies stayed away from the front line as “soul-destroying”.

Sean Binnie was a 22-year-old acting sergeant when he was killed while on patrol with the Black Watch in Helmand Province in May 2009.

Trump claimed that Nato sent “some troops” but “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines”.

Janette Binnie, 58, of Crimond in Aberdeenshire, told BBC Scotland News: “His comment are soul-destroying, for me personally as a mum, that’s lost my only child in that war. How can you stand there and say this?”

The UK was among several allies to join the US in Afghanistan after Nato’s collective security clause was invoked for the first and only time in its history following the 9/11 attacks.

During the conflict, 457 British service personnel were killed.

Article 5 of Nato states that an attack on one member is considered an attack against all.

But Trump told Fox News on Thursday that he was “not sure” the military alliance would be there for the US “if we ever needed them”.

“We’ve never needed them,” he said, adding: “We have never really asked anything of them.”

“They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan,” he said, “and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines”.

Binnie joined the army in 2003 when he was 16.

He served in Iraq, The Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland before deployment to Afghanistan.

He was shot dead as he threw a grenade while fighting insurgents.

He had been married to wife Amanda for just six months.

Of Trump’s comments, the soldier’s mother she had “never heard so much claptrap”.

She said: “The man’s got no idea about the logistics or the core of the military, the boys went to Afghanistan because they needed them.

“We were all there fighting the same war.

“My son worked alongside some of the Americans. He’s just diminished everything that our children have done.”

She said she was “angry, very angry, very very angry”, adding: “How can he say they weren’t on the front lines when they were out there fighting?”

She added: “I’d love President Trump to come and see me.

“I’d soon tell him how it is being an army wife and an army mother, and what it is to lose a child in those circumstances, something that he knows nothing about.”

The US president was “wrong” to diminish the role of Nato and British troops in Afghanistan, Downing Street said.