Afghan forces start receiving reinforcements as fight continues in Helmand

However, the hub-and-spoke operation omitted the key province of Helmand, which saw some of the bloodiest battles against the Taliban. But it is not the only province where the Taliban have made gains.

A spokesman for the Afghan army in Helmand, Guam Rasoul Zazai, said Afghan military air strikes had also bombarded Taliban strongholds overnight, killing 25 insurgents and wounding another 12.

Monday was the deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan since May 2013, when five were killed by a roadside bomb in the country’s south and two killed by an Afghan soldier in an insider attack in the west. Before Monday’s attack, the most recent American casualties in the country were on August 22, when three contractors were killed in a suicide attack in Kabul. Besieged Afghan security forces have been resupplied by airdrops.

Heavy fighting is reported to be continuing between Afghan forces and Taliban militants in the district of Sangin in the southern province of Helmand, which the militants overran earlier this week.

“They realized the fragility of the Afghan army without proper support”. Afghan officials confirmed that Afghan forces had added their own airstrikes as well.

Security has worsened across the country as the Taliban test the mettle of Afghan security forces after the end of the worldwide combat mission past year.

The Taliban statement listed barriers to peace negotiations, including United Nations sanctions on individualTaliban figures which were extended this week, and the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan, with specific mention of the British troops that arrived in Helmand on Wednesday to provide support for Afghan forces battling in Sangin.

“We need help, we can’t hold them for much longer”, Mr Zamarai said, “It’s not that we are afraid of death, but we didn’t think that our brothers would leave us like this”.

A Taliban statement said that before “interfering” in Afghanistan, Britain should have ‘studied their ancestor’s history, to learn from it. If they learned lessons from their repeated defeats in Afghanistan, they wouldn’t come to invade us.

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

The loss of Sangin would be a significant blow for the government in Kabul because it is central to the opium trade and was a stranglehold for the insurgents.

He told BBC Radio 4’s World At One: “What we ought to be doing in all these countries is having a flexible force which can swoop in and swoop out again, a mixture of special forces supported by air power in support of friendly ground forces where they exist”. More than 100 British soldiers died in Sangin. “It is a confidence thing”. Two U.S. troops and an Afghan also were wounded when the bomber drove his explosives-laden motorcycle into a joint NATO-Afghan patrol.