U.S. strike hits Taliban after peace deal signed

KABUL, Afghanistan — The United States conducted an airstrike against Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday just days after the two sides signed a peace deal.

The strike came just hours after President Donald Trump spoke to senior Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar by phone Tuesday. Trump said he had “a very good talk” with the militants’ senior political leader and that the two men agreed on “no violence; we don’t want violence.”

The U.S. military spokesman in Kabul said the strike was carried out in defense of Afghan security forces when their outpost in Helmand came under attack by Taliban fighters.

Col. Sonny Leggett added that Taliban forces had conducted 43 attacks on Afghan troops on Tuesday in Helmand. According to a spokesman for the province’s governor, Omer Zwak, at least two police officers were killed and one other was wounded in the Washir district of southern Helmand.

“This was a defensive strike to disrupt the attack. This was our 1st strike against the Taliban in 11 days,” Leggett said in a statement on Twitter.

The strike comes amid an uptick in violence nationwide in Afghanistan over the past two days. On Monday the Taliban announced it had resumed offensive operations against Afghan security forces. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the “reduction-in-violence period is over.”

Over the past 24 hours, the Taliban have conducted dozens of attacks across the country that have killed four civilians, 11 security forces and wounded 18 others, according to Nasrat Rahimi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

The deadliest of the assaults so far were on the out- skirts of Kunduz in the north in the early hours of Wednesday. The Taliban’s elite Red Unit stormed Afghan army outposts there from several directions, killing at least 15 Afghan soldiers, according to Lt. Col. Mashuq Kohistani, the commander of the Afghan army battalion in the area.

“We were newly establishing the base, and our soldiers did not have proper trenches to protect themselves,” Kohistani said. “The Taliban killed 15 soldiers, one was wounded, and just two soldiers could escape alive.”

Kohistani said he had arrived at the scene to pick up the bodies in the morning and had found that many of the soldiers had been shot in the head, most likely by sniper fire.

The Taliban have not claimed responsibility for any of these attacks so far or commented on the U.S. airstrike Wednesday.

The peace deal signed Feb. 29 between Taliban leaders and U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad in Doha, Qatar, called for the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan within 14 months. A critical precondition to the signing of the deal was a week of decreased violence across Afghanistan. But the agreement did not address violence levels moving forward.

Regardless, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan has said violence levels were expected to remain low.

“Taliban leadership promised the int’l community they would reduce violence and not increase attacks. We call on the Taliban to stop needless attacks and uphold their commitments. As we have demonstrated, we will defend our partners when required,” Leggett, the U.S. military spokesman said on Twitter Wednesday.

“The United States has been very clear about our expectations — the violence must remain low,” Gen. Austin S. Miller, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a Twitter message posted by his spokesman.

Miller provided no details on what “low” means. However, on a visit with Afghan forces Tuesday, he reiterated that the United States would continue to send air support when Afghan forces under attack need it.

“We will continue to defend the Afghan security forces,” he said, as quoted by the Afghan channel ToloNews.

“The fact that the Taliban now have an agreement with the United States, there is no reason left for the Taliban to continue their violence — their own self-proclaimed so-called legitimacy is also gone,” Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s national security adviser, said in an interview with PBS.

Leggett called on the Taliban to stop the attacks and uphold their commitments based on the peace agreement, which lays out a conditions-based path to the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan.

Nadir Naim, a member of the Afghan high peace council, said there was a fear of the “repeat of the Soviet withdrawal aftermath,” when guerrilla forces continued to attack the Afghan government after Soviet soldiers began withdrawing, driving the country into a bloody anarchy.

“The unpredictability of Afghanistan’s future is a cause of great concern right now,” Naim said.

The increased violence comes as Afghan government and Taliban leaders are locked in disagreement over a controversial prisoner exchange that could determine the future of peace talks moving forward.

The U.S.-Taliban peace deal called for the prisoner exchange to take place before intra-Afghan talks Tuesday. But Ghani has ruled that out. The Taliban responded that the movement would not enter into talks with the Afghan government without a prisoner swap first.