6 U.S. troops killed during Afghan patrol
Taliban overrun key area
KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide attacker rammed an explosives-laden motorcycle into a joint NATO-Afghan patrol Monday, killing six American troops in the deadliest attack on international forces since August. Two U.S. troops and an Afghan were wounded.
The attack happened as Taliban fighters overran a strategically important district in southern Helmand province, the scene of some of the deadliest fighting between the Taliban and international combat forces before the 2014 withdrawal, adding weight to Pentagon warnings that the insurgency is gaining strength.
The soldiers were targeted as they moved through a village near Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military facility in Afghanistan, NATO and Afghan officials said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a Twitter message.
A statement by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter confirmed that the six American service members had been killed, and it said that another two had been wounded, along with a contractor for the U.S. military.
In New York, Police Commissioner William Bratton said Monday that a police detective, Joseph Lemm, was one of the six Americans killed in the attack.
Lemm was a 15-year veteran of the New York Police Department and worked in the Bronx Warrant Squad. Bratton said Lemm served
in the U.S. National Guard and, while a member of the police force, he had been deployed twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq. He’s survived by a wife and three children.
In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the nation’s thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and their loved ones and that the U.S. will continue to work with Afghans to promote peace and stability in their country.
Carter, in his statement, called the attack “a painful reminder of the dangers our troops face every day in Afghanistan.”
It was the deadliest attack on foreign troops in four months. On Aug. 22, three American contractors with the Kabul base were killed in a suicide attack in the city. On Aug. 7 and 8, Kabul was the scene of three insurgent attacks within 24 hours that left at least 35 people dead. One of the attacks, on a U.S. special operations forces base outside Kabul, killed one U.S. soldier and eight Afghan civilian contractors.
In the year since the international drawdown, the Taliban insurgency has intensified. Although the combat mission ended last year, about 9,800 U.S. troops and almost 4,000 NATO forces remain in Afghanistan. They have a mandate to “train, assist and advise” their Afghan counterparts, who are now effectively fighting the battle-hardened Taliban alone.
TALIBAN GAIN GROUND
Monday’s attack came as Taliban fighters and government forces battled for control of a district in the southern province of Helmand after it was overrun by insurgents, delivering a serious blow to the government’s thinly spread and exhausted forces.
Mohammad Jan Rasulyar, Helmand’s deputy governor, said insurgents took control of Sangin district late Sunday.
Rasulyar had taken the unusual step of alerting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to the dire security situation and requesting urgent reinforcements through an open letter posted on Facebook on Sunday, saying that he had not been able to make contact through other means.
On Monday, Defense Ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said Afghan Army commandos and special forces had arrived in Sangin to push a counter-offensive.
He told reporters that the Afghan air force had conducted 160 combat and transport flights over Sangin in the previous 48 hours.
Helmand is an important Taliban base because it produces most of the world’s opium, a crop that helps fund the insurgency.
Sangin district has bounced in and out of Taliban control for years, and fighting there has produced some of the highest casualty counts among Afghan and international forces in 14 years of war.
British forces experienced intense fighting there at the height of the war in 2006 and 2007. Among the 450 British troops killed during the country’s combat mission in Afghanistan, more than 100 died in Sangin. In 2008, a battalion of U.S. Marines arrived in Helmand, followed a year later by the first wave of President Barack Obama’s “surge” effort against the Taliban, comprising 11,000 Marines who conducted operations across the province.
Officials in Helmand on Monday pleaded with the national government for reinforcements, saying Sangin remained largely under Taliban control.
“Last night, NATO forces targeted two locations in Sangin, but it has not affected the Taliban momentum, and heavy fighting still continues,” said Mohammad Karim Atal, head of the provincial council in Helmand.
Atal said the Taliban leadership, based across the border in Pakistan, had decided six months ago to seize Helmand and base more of the insurgent command in the province.
Atal said about 65 percent of Helmand was under Taliban control.
“In every district either we are stepping back or we are handing territory over to Taliban, but still, until now, no serious action has been taken,” he said, referring to a perceived lack of support from the capital.
Taliban fighters, sometimes working with other insurgent groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, have managed to overrun many districts
across the country this year and also staged a three-day takeover of the major northern city of Kunduz. They rarely hold territory for more than a few hours or days, but the effect on the morale of Afghan forces, and people, is substantial.
Atal said more than 2,000 members of security forces had been killed fighting in Helmand in 2015. He said a major reason Afghan forces were “losing” was the large number of soldiers and police deserting their posts in the face of the Taliban onslaught.
Fighting in Afghanistan has intensified since the announcement in late July that the founder and leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead for more than two years. His deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, succeeded him, causing internal ructions and decreasing the likelihood that a peace dialogue with the Afghan government, halted after the announcement of Omar’s death, will restart in the foreseeable future.
The expected winter lull in fighting has not yet taken place in the warmer southern provinces. U.S. and Afghan military leaders said they are expecting a hot winter, followed by a tough fight throughout 2016.
The Pentagon released a report recently warning that the security situation in Afghanistan would deteriorate as a “resilient Taliban-led insurgency remains an enduring threat to U.S., coalition, and Afghan forces, as well as to the Afghan people.”
U.N. SANCTIONS
The United Nations Security Council extended sanctions against the Taliban for 18 months in a resolution passed Monday that warned of the increasing presence of affiliates of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.
Nicholas Haysom, the U.N. envoy for Afghanistan,
told reporters after briefing the council that the security situation in Afghanistan is “extremely challenging,” with the most significant threat coming from the Taliban insurgency.
But he said that while the Islamic State has only a limited presence at the moment, primarily in Nangahar province in the east, it should not be underestimated.
“They certainly constitute a worrying factor, when they represent an alternative flagpole around which a large variety of disaffected groups can rally,” Haysom said.
The resolution, adopted unanimously, stressed the importance of ensuring that sanctions contribute to combating the Taliban insurgency and restoring peace.
Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan’s U.N. ambassador, said his country hopes that Monday’s resolution and other U.N. resolutions targeting the Islamic State and other extremist groups “will further tighten the noose on the activities of al-Qaida, ISIS and the Taliban,” he said, using an acronym to refer to the Islamic State.
He pointed to a “rapid growth” of the Islamic State in the east and other parts of Afghanistan and warned that the fight against “international terrorism and violent extremism” will have repercussions beyond his country’s borders.
“The cost of an insecure Afghanistan and its consequences is far greater than a secure Afghanistan,” Saikal said, pointing to the flight of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees to Europe.
Haysom and the security council stressed the importance of political negotiations between the government and Taliban as the only route to peace.
Haysom said the U.N. welcomes the Afghan government’s commitment to a peace process, reiterated at a regional conference in
Islamabad this month, and called on the Taliban to reciprocate.
Information for this article was contributed by Lynne O’Donnell, Mirwais Khan, Humayoon Babur, Amir Shah, Lolita C. Baldor and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press and by Mujib Mashal and Matthew Rosenberg of