Afghan Taliban repelled in key Helmand district

Security forces refute insurgents' claim of capturing Sangin.

KABUL // Afghan forces on Thursday repelled a Taliban attempt to take a strategically important district in Helmand province after the United States launched two air strikes overnight.

Akhtar Muhammad, a police commander in Sangin district, said fighting was continuing after insurgents captured the area around the district governor’s compound overnight but were pushed back.

“An hour later we recaptured that building and now we have it,” he said.

The Nato mission in Afghanistan said US military conducted two air strikes in the vicinity of Sangin on Wednesday night.

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

Operations were slowed as insurgents began taking shelter in civilian homes, he said.

A Taliban claim that they had the district under their control was widely refuted. Taliban statements regularly exaggerate battlefield gains, though government casualty figures are also impossible to verify.

Sangin is an important prize for the Taliban. It sits on crucial smuggling routes for drugs, arms and other contraband which fund the insurgency.

The Taliban have been fighting for control of Sangin for almost a month, though the battle intensified a week ago as government reinforcements failed to arrive and Afghan security forces were pinned down inside an army base.

The acting defence minister, Masoom Stanekzai, said reinforcements arrived on Wednesday afternoon.

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

“Taliban rumours that they have captured the district are not true,” he said.

The fighting in Helmand, seen as the centre of the expanding insurgency, follows a string of military victories for the Taliban after Nato formally ended its combat operations last December.

All but two of Helmand’s 14 districts are effectively controlled or heavily contested by the Taliban, who also recently came close to overrunning the provincial capital Lashkar Gah.

The Taliban on Thursday issued a statement laying out conditions for talks to end the war, now in its fourteenth year. Talk of a dialogue between the government in Kabul and the insurgents has resurfaced following a regional conference in the Pakistani capital earlier this month where hopes were raised that a process that was cancelled over the summer could be revived in the coming year.

The announcement in July that the Taliban founder and leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead for more than two years saw the group pull out of a dialogue process after only one meeting in Pakistan. It also led to deep fissures in the group’s leadership, creating confusion about just who the Afghan government should be talking to.

The Taliban statement listed barriers to peace negotiations, including United Nations sanctions on Taliban members 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.

Political analyst Waheed Muzhda, formerly an official in the Taliban’s 1996-2001 administration, said the Taliban needed to sort out its leadership problems before it started talking about the peace process. Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who was Mullah Omar’s deputy and took his place in August, has been locked in an increasingly violent dispute over the legitimacy of his position.

“This is an issue that has to be clear in the negotiating process,” Mr Muzhda said.

* Associated Press with additional reporting by Agence France-Presse