KABUL – Afghanistan is repositioning forces to the south after complaints that too few are involved in major US and British offensives against the Taliban, officials said yesterday, even as clashes erupted in the north.
Afghan troops fought a group of Taliban fighters dug into a valley in northern Kunduz yesterday, defence ministry spokesman Zaher Azimi said. He said fighters loyal to a wanted al Qaeda-linked Uzbek leader had entered the north recently.
With violence this year hitting its highest levels since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, thousands of US marines and British troops launched assaults in the southern Taliban stronghold of Helmand this month.
The new offensives are the first major operations under US president Barack Obama’s new regional strategy to defeat the Taliban and its militant Islamist allies and stabilise Afghanistan, which holds a presidential election on August 20th.
A convoy belonging to a presidential candidate, former Taliban commander Mullah Salam Rocketi, was ambushed as he returned to Kabul after campaigning in northern Baghlan, and one of his officials was killed.
Rocketi, a commander during Taliban rule who renounced that organisation after its overthrow to become a minister of the Afghan parliament, was unhurt.
Two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the south yesterday, the US military said, taking to at least 30 the number killed in combat in July – the deadliest month for US forces in the country since the invasion in late 2001.
Another member of the Nato-led force was killed in a separate blast.
Britain’s ministry of defence said a British soldier had been killed.
The aim of the operations in Helmand is to clear the vast province of insurgents and to hold the ground it wins – something overstretched Nato forces have so far been unable to do.
But the offensives underscored weaknesses in the Afghan security forces, with only about 650 fighting alongside some 4,000 US marines and a similar number of British troops in the major opium-producing centre.
Brig Gen Lawrence Nicholson said many more Afghans were needed to build relations with local leaders, a major part of a new counter-insurgency strategy under Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, and to identify Taliban members hiding among residents. – (Reuters)