Taliban Insurgents Targeted By US Airstrikes

Afghanistan’s acting defence minister says reinforcements have been rushed to a besieged southern district threatened for days with takeover by Taliban fighters.

Just 14 months after British combat troops left the province, Taliban insurgents were in control of all but a handful of government buildings in Sangin’s district centre.

However government officials have denied the claim and said they have pushed back Taliban insurgents seeking to re-establish their hard-line Islamist regime after being toppled by U.S.-led military intervention in 2001.

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation said that they had not conducted any airstrikes in Sangin but the Afghan air force probably had.

Sangin is a key district in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, a strategically important fertile poppy-growing area. On Wednesday, a spokesman said insurgents had captured the district of Gulistan in Farah, a remote western province that, like Helmand, is a major center of opium cultivation.

Helmand’s deputy governor, Mohammad Jan Rasulyar, said all lines of communication with Sangin had been cut and that there was no immediate information available on the situation there. Two U.S. troops and an Afghan were also wounded in that attack – the deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan since May 2013.

But the father of a soldier killed in Afghanistan when his vehicle was caught in a suicide blast in 2006 has said nothing can justify sending more troops to Helmand.

The fierce fighting in Helmand, a traditional Taliban stronghold and one of the world’s main centers of opium production, has piled pressure on President Ashraf Ghani, already on the defensive as security worsens across the country.

“The problem is where the Afghan forces have to fend for themselves”, he said.

Fighters have seized the entire district and their flag was flying over Sangin, the Taliban said. British troops in Sangin suffered more than 100 of their 456 fatalities during the U.K.’s 13-year Afghanistan combat mission.

Militants break through the frontlines of Sangin on Sunday after days of pitched clashes with besieged Afghan forces.

Mir compared Helmand to Kunduz, the northern Afghan city that the Taliban took over and held for three days in September, sending shockwaves across a country that had come to believe the insurgents were not strong enough to take urban areas.

The defense secretary noted that on each stop of his visit last week to Afghanistan – which included stops on Bagram and Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad – he saw USA and Afghan troops working side-by-side.

With intense fighting continuing, Afghan forces were unable to take care of their deceased comrades.

However, the country still maintains about 450 troops in mentoring and support roles.