The Taliban, who already control nearly all of Sangin district, said on Wednesday that they had captured police and administrative buildings in the district centre, where small groups of police had been holding out.
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Fighting continued after insurgents captured the area around the district governor’s compound overnight before being pushed back.
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USA aircraft carried out two attacks in Sangin, officials said yesterday.
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Fifty-three people infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli O26 have been reported from nine states. The majority of illnesses have been reported from Washington and OR during October 2015.
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. “Our men are hungry and thirsty”, Abdul Wahab, a local police commander in Sangin, told AFP news agency. “Stepping out to get bread means inviting death”, he said, adding that dozens of his comrades had been killed and grievously wounded.
The war in Helmand, seen as the epicentre of the insurgency, follows a string of Taleban victories after North Atlantic Treaty Organisation formally ended its combat operations past year.
He conceded that many important districts in Helmand had been under prolonged Taliban attack, including Khanshin on the Pakistan border and Marjah, and that the provincial capital Lashkar Gah had also been targeted by the insurgents.
The turmoil in Helmand, the deadliest province for British and United States forces in Afghanistan over the past decade, underscores a rapidly unravelling security situation in Afghanistan.
Though the Afghan military expressed confidence in their ability to retake the area, the fact that they keep losing those areas in the first place is reducing faith in the security forces’ ability to fight the Taliban on an even footing. The airport in Kandahar has for years been a major hub for operations of global forces, most of whom had withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2014-end.
“Sangin signifies another humiliating defeat for NATO-trained Afghan forces”, security analyst Mia Gul Waseeq told AFP. Afghanistan’s opium output is worth up to $3 billion a year, much of it going to the Taliban which sponsors and polices its production and transport.
US President Barack Obama announced in October that thousands of US troops would remain in Afghanistan past 2016, keeping the current force of 9,800 troops, amid a surge in Taliban attacks.
Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani travelled to Pakistan this month to open a conference that shored up global support for Taliban talks.
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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 between representatives of each side.
