Sangin district of Afghanistan now nearly entirely under Taliban control

Meanwhile, there are reports that a group of British forces have been deployed in Helmand province to support the Afghan national security forces in repelling the Taliban offensive, however the British officials have said the forces are deployed in the area and have and advisory role rather than combat role.

“The military is in position and the operation is ongoing”, he told a press conference in Kabul.

In recent days, the Taliban assault has threatened to overrun Sangin, a major poppy-growing area in Helmand, raising alarm that Afghan forces were too overstretched to fend off the insurgency.

It saw the heaviest British losses as more than 100 troops were killed in the decade-long battle to secure the Helmand province district. Two U.S. troops and an Afghan were also wounded in that attack – the deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan since May 2013.

When Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani took office, it ushered in a period of hope for the country’s traumatized people that decades of violence would soon end.

The decision to send around 10 British advisers back to the former United Kingdom military base Camp Bastion – following the deployment of SAS troops to halt the militant advance – was taunted by the Taliban as “stupid”.

The MoD insists they will not have a combat role.

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

Afghan commanders have called for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation back up after the Taliban claimed to have taken control of the strategic town of Sangin.

Other reports suggested that government forces were still fighting in the centre of Sangin but were cut off from any help.

The fight for Sangin has been particularly ferocious, with officials saying that only the army base was still in government hands until Tuesday.

Kabul said reinforcements had been rushed to the town and fighting was continuing.

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”.

President Barack Obama in October announced that thousands of U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan past 2016, backpedalling on previous plans to reduce the force and acknowledging that Afghan forces are not ready to stand alone.

Helmand abuts the Pakistani border, which makes it easy for the Taliban to resupply from its strongholds in Pakistan and maintain a steady stream of fighters.

“We already said that our forces are weak and need backup but because we have no communication with our forces, we don’t know whether the Taliban have captured Sangin or not”, Rasulyar added.

Afghanistan’s spy agency chief resigned earlier this month after a scathing Facebook post that vented frustration over Ghani’s diplomatic outreach to Pakistan.