SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- U.S. Army Green Berets have begun training Salvadoran troops in counterinsurgency techniques as part of a controversial U.S. military aid program to the embattled Salvadoran government, a U.S. embassy spokeswoman said.
The 12 Green Berets began the training sessions Friday and are instructing government troops in counterinsurgency, patrolling, air mobile operations, communications and the use of M-16 automatic rifles, the U.S. embassy spokeswoman Carol Dorflien said Monday.
Embassy officials have rejected press requests for photographs of the Green Berets training Salvadoran troops in an apparent effort to keep their presence in the violence-wracked country as low key as possible.
The Green Berets are among 56 U.S. military men sent to El Salvador by the Reagan administration to help the Salvadoran government fight leftist insurgests -- a move criticized by some American congressmen as dragging the United States into another Vietnam.
An incendiary bomb planted by unidentified extremists exploded outside a supermarket in San Salvador's northern residential section of Santa Fe but witnesses reported no deaths or injuries in the incident.
The Justice Ministry's said 15 people died in the latest round of political violence between leftists, government troops and rightist death squads in the Central American nation, where Catholic church officials estimate some 18,000 people have been killed since Jan. 1, 1980.
The Green Cross, an emergency relief group similar to the Red Cross, accused army troops of raiding the La Bermuda refugee camp, 18 miles north of San Salvador, arresting 28 men, and looting medicines from the camp Saturdday.
Army officers in the nearby town of Suchitoto say some of the refugees have helped leftist insurgents to sabotage water and power lines into the town.
