The UK Ministry of Defence said on Tuesday that British troops had been deployed to the province to support local forces after the Afghan Defence Minister called for a desperate global support and air cover.
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But the loss of Sangin, which British and United States forces fought for years to control, would be a heavy blow for Western powers backing President Ashraf Ghani’s government, now fighting alone since worldwide forces ended combat operations last year.
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Eyewitnesses say some government forces were still fighting in the district centre but are cut off and facing slaughter by the Taliban.
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“US forces conducted two strikes in Sangin on December 23 against threats to the force”, a spokesman for the military coalition said.
But the Taliban still managed to seize the city of Kunduz in the north for a week in September, and now Sangin in the southwest is going.
Sangin is a key district in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, a strategically important fertile poppy-growing area.
He warned that all of Helmand could fall to the Taliban if the President didn’t take action. “Because if the people we were trying to free Afghanistan from are now able to just take it back within two years, that shows that something went badly wrong at the operational and strategic level”.
Helmand’s deputy governor, Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar, told Al Jazeera that government forces are “fighting to push back the Taliban”, and that “parts of Sangin are under Taliban control, but not the police and military installations”.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which it said was carried out by a “fearless mujahid” named Zahidullah.
District governor Haji Suliman Shah has been airlifted from the district headquarters along with 15 wounded security force members, it was reported. Civilians are fleeing the area after fears grew that the Taliban could capture the entire southern province.
The insurgents are prone to exaggerating its battlefield successes, and Kabul officials denied that Sangin had fallen. “The Taliban are in control of the district”, a source said.
Military advisers from Britain have joined other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation advisers in Helmand to help Afghan forces who have struggled to contain the insurgency since foreign troops withdrew from combat operations previous year. The fight for Sangin has been particularly ferocious, with officials saying that only the army base was still in government hands until Tuesday.
The Taliban issued a statement on Thursday laying out conditions for a peace dialogue to end the war, now in its 14th year. Talk of a dialogue between the Kabul government 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 2016.
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Pakistan hosted a first round of negotiations in July but the talks stalled when the Taliban belatedly confirmed the death of longtime leader Mullah Omar.
