Fighting Rages In Helmand

The Afghan Defense Ministry has deployed reinforcements and insists the battle isn’t over, but for the time being all indications are that the Sangin District in Helmand Province has effectively fallen, leaving the Taliban in full control of the area.

A strategically important district in the southern Afghan province of Helmand that has been besieged by the Taliban for weeks remains under government control after the United States conducted two airstrikes overnight, officials said on Thursday.

The Afghan government on Wednesday dismissed the report on the fall of Sangin district to the Taliban militants as groundless. That NATO nations, and Britain in particular invested so much effort in holding the district only for the Afghans to lose it only adds insult to injury.

There are unconfirmed reports that British special forces are also advising Afghan troops around Sangin.

United Kingdom advisers were flown in over the weekend to help train struggling Afghan forces failing to halt Taliban advances across the province. He said the district governor’s headquarters, very often the final outpost standing when districts are considered to have been captured, had simply been relocated. These troops are supposedly not to be deployed outside the camp, the ministry said.

Diane Dernie, whose son Ben Parkinson lost his legs and was left brain-damaged by a bomb in Afghanistan in 2006, said she feared the Government was ” still not learning the lessons and that it’s British troops that are going to pay the price for that failure to learn”.

Before the strikes, the Taliban already held three Helmand districts and moved freely outside the main populations, centers exercising control over strategic transportation routes.

Masoom Stanekzai said on Wednesday fighting in the Sangin district of Helmand is continuing as army and police arrive to help security forces who have been pinned down for days.

A small contingent of British troops has been sent to Helmand “in an advisory role”, the British government said on Tuesday.

Attempts to airdrop food to the defenders were unsuccessful until an air strike, believed to been carried out by Afghan air forces, temporarily dislodged Taliban positions and allowed supplies to get through, according to officials.

On Monday the deputy governor of Helmand complained of a lack of government support in an open letter on Facebook to President Ashraf Ghani. The U.K. has 450 troops in Afghanistan as part of NATO’s training mission.

Sangin is an area, which used to be a British battleground that witnessed the killing of more than 100 British soldiers.

The announcement that British soldiers are being dispatched to Helmand province came hours after a Taliban suicide bomber killed six US troops near a major military base in Parwan province in the deadliest single attack on American troops in the country since 2013.

The unrest in Helmand, blighted by a huge opium harvest that helps fund the insurgency, comes after the Taliban briefly captured Kunduz city in September – their biggest victory in 14 years of war.