Three hundred British paratroopers landed in a presumed insurgent stronghold on Saturday during the biggest operation since the Taliban were toppled almost five years ago.
The United States-led assault in Helmand made it clear that British troops are fully engaged in conflict in Afghanistan and not just in supporting civilian reconstruction.
Apache gunships launched the attack, followed by Chinook helicopters that ferried British troops into a residential area. Around 600 Canadian ground troops sealed the southern approaches to the Sangin valley in Helmand province west of Kandahar while US troops blocked the northern end.
According to reports in the Canadian media, the troops found most insurgents had fled the dawn attack, which was intended to catch them unawares. ”On arrival, the infantry fought a short battle in which 10 Taliban were killed,” said the Canadian coalition spokesperson Major Scott Lundy. ”The initial contact was somewhat smaller than had been anticipated.”
Military intelligence had predicted they would find up to 400 Taliban insurgents but most slipped away. Lundy described it as ”like punching flies”, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Three British soldiers received minor injuries during the attack, in which a helicopter was fired at by rocket-propelled grenades. Troops responded with a missile and burst of cannon fire which appeared to have left two Taliban fighters dead and one woman slightly hurt. Another 700 British troops were involved in supply roles in the weekend assault.
President Hamid Karzai, who has repeatedly expressed concern about the risk of civilian deaths in the coalition’s operations, on Sunday called for an inquiry into the Sangin attack.
Nearly half of the 10 000 coalition combat troops currently in Afghanistan are involved in the US operation Mountain Thrust, which is spread over five provinces and began early last month.
Sangin was the target of the latest assault. ”What we’re trying to do is concentrate on that one area for a very short period of time, break the back of the Taliban in that area,” coalition officials said. The hope then is for the Afghan government to restore its authority there and allow ”development to follow security”.
At least 27 Taliban insurgents were killed in another engagement at Mirmundaze about 24km north of Sangin later on Saturday, according to the provincial police chief Ghulam Nabi Malakhail. Another 18 Taliban were wounded and 10 Taliban arrested, he said.
Six British soldiers have been killed in and around Sangin in just over a month. Violence across southern Afghanistan has killed about 800 people, mostly Afghans, since May. The bloodshed marks the deadliest period since the US invasion in late 2001. Karzai’s call for an inquiry came after he set up an Afghan-led investigation into a US air strike a week ago on Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province, in which at least four civilians died.
The US military says it killed 40 insurgents but has agreed to help with the inquiry. US officers also deny killing civilians when US planes, called in by British troops, dropped 226kg bombs on suspected Taliban fighters in Nawzad on Wednesday.
Elsewhere in Afghanistan, four people died in a suicide bombing on Sunday outside a government building in Gardez, capital of the south-eastern border province of Paktia. British and Afghan forces came under heavy fire from a hospital in Nawzad. ”This is the 27th attack in 18 days,” said British military spokesperson Captain Drew Gibson.”Our forces are coming under fire from a hospital. It appears it is a deliberate attempt to draw us into firing back at the hospital.”
Insurgents dressed in burqas to disguise themselves as women in the province of Khost before shooting dead two Afghan men on Saturday, the US military said. A bomb killed six Afghan troops in Herat province on Sunday and a coalition soldier died after being shot.
In Iraq the death toll of British service personnel rose to 114 after a soldier from the 1st Battalion Devonshire and Dorset Light Infantry was killed on Sunday during an operation to seize suspected terrorists in Basra, southern Iraq. The injuries of another soldier wounded in the attack are not thought to be life-threatening.
Two men suspected of ”serious crime and terrorism” in Basra province were seized in the operation, the Ministry of Defence said. Twenty-one people were killed in the town of Tuz Khurmatu on Sunday when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a cafe frequented by Shias. – Guardian Unlimited Â