Pentagon chief mourns death of six American troops in Afghanistan

The US military has confirmed that those six soldiers killed in an attack on North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces near an airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan were American troops. There will still be US troops in the country when he leaves office.

Atal said more than 2,000 security forces personnel had been killed fighting in Helmand in 2015.

He said that officers were running out of ammunition and food after several days of holding off the Taliban, but no help had reached them yet.

Local officials in Helmand on Monday pleaded with the national government for reinforcements, saying that the district of Sangin remained largely under Taliban control after insurgents overran it on Sunday.

Helmand’s governor, Mirza Khan Rahimi, said the authorities were still in control of the key town within Helmand province.

Combat operations by the U.K in Afghanistan officially ended previous year but Britain decided not to withdraw its soldiers in order to bolster the country’s security forces fighting the Taliban. The death toll claimed by the Taliban does not correlate with that given by Brig.

U.S. and United Kingdom forces were deployed into Helmand at the start of the invasion of Afghanistan, but the United Kingdom took the main role after 2006, after the Taliban and al Qaeda had evaded the coalition forces and either escaped into neighboring Pakistan or retreated to rural or remote mountainous regions. A Pentagon report released last week found that security is deteriorating in Afghanistan, with the Taliban still a potent threat and Islamic State militants gaining strength.

The Taliban have been getting closer to taking full control of the Sangin district for days, with most government buildings now in Taliban hands.

The volatile district was the scene of heavy fighting between insurgents and British forces until 2010, when U.S. Marines took over responsibility for the area.

According to the AP, most of the world’s opium is produced in Helmand.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike carried out the attack on a joint patrol of Afghan and coalition forces at about 1:30 p.m.in the Bajawri area of Bagram district, said Waheed Sediqi, a spokesman for the governor of Parwan province.

“It is vital that the national unity government demonstrates increasingly its effectiveness, not only to the Afghan people but also donors on whom it is largely dependent”, Nicholas Haysom said in a briefing to the UN Security Council. Insurgents also recently overran Babaji, a suburb of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, fuelling concern that the city could fall to the insurgents.

Districts across Helmand, including Nad Ali, Kajaki, Musa Qala, Naw Zad, Gereshk and Garmser, have all been threatened by Taliban takeover in recent months. He said a major reason Afghan forces were “losing” was the large number of soldiers and police deserting their posts in the face of the Taliban onslaught.