Afghan troops rushed to area under Taliban attack

Shadi Khan, a tribal elder in Sangin who is also director of the Sangin District Council, said he was trapped in the base for three days before government forces arrived.

The Taliban, meanwhile, issued a statement saying that foreign forces were directly involved in the fighting in Sangin and accusing them of carrying out airstrikes on residential areas.

“I have already said earlier that we and the Taliban have channels for exchanging information”, Kabulov added, in remarks reported by Interfax.

The crisis in Helmand has piled pressure on the government of President Ashraf Ghani, following the fall of the northern city of Kunduz in September, which Taliban fighters seized and held for several days.

Sangin became symbolically important for Britain when it claimed 106 lives – almost a quarter of the nations’ dead – during the 13-year-long combat mission in Afghanistan. She was also the first female OSI agent killed in the line of duty, Air Force spokeswoman Linda Card said.

The UK Ministry of Defence said on Tuesday that British troops had been deployed to the province to support local forces after the Afghan Defence Minister called for a desperate global support and air cover.

A local Taliban commander and 50 fighters have been killed in overnight fighting in Sangin in Helmand province, the Afghan interior ministry said.

A few hundred police and soldiers have taken refuge at an army barracks about 7km (four miles) from Sangin, and are besieged there.

He said: “Support troops have been airdropped at a distance… but all roads are blocked and in the militants” control’.

Afghan government forces had been “thinly spread” over the whole country, he said, and had been trying their best to hold all areas.

Speaking in Kabul, Afghanistan’s acting Defence Minister Masoum Stanikzai described the situation in Helmand as “manageable” and said fresh support troops had been sent in.

Afghan officials said they retook key buildings in a counter-attack, while the U.S. carried out air strikes. But he said that the Afghan military had successful recaptured them over the last day. “It’s not that we are afraid of death, but we didn’t think that our brothers would leave us like this”.

A Taliban claim that it had the district under its control was widely denied.

UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has insisted that combat troops would not return to Afghanistan, where 456 British troops died, “under any circumstances”.

The militant group has taken over the entire district except for the police chief’s compound and another compound, where a battalion of the Afghan National Army is based, according to Shah Mahmood Ashna, a spokesman for the police chief in Helmand province.

Stanekzai said that with the arrival of new troops to the area, the battle would be reinvigorated and “this should help cut the number of casualties and provide much-needed logistical support”.

“Rumors about Lashkar Gah (falling to the Taliban) are totally baseless because we don’t have fear of losing the districts, so there is no fear of losing the center”, Abdullah said.