Taliban slaughters elite Afghan troops

SANG-E-MASHA, Afghanistan — One pickup after another arrived at the government compound in a district capital in Afghanistan on Sunday, pulling around to the back of the governor’s office to unload the dead, out of sight of panicked residents.

Soldiers and police officers, many in tears, heaved bodies of their comrades from the trucks and laid them on sheets on the ground, side by side on their backs, until there were 20 of them.

The dead all wore the desertbrown boots of Afghanistan’s finest troops, the Special Forces commandos trained by the United States.

Four days earlier, the soldiers had been airlifted in to rescue what is widely considered Afghanistan’s safest rural district, Jaghori, from a determined assault by Taliban insurgents.

Early Sunday, their company of 50 soldiers was almost entirely destroyed on the front line.

And suddenly, Jaghori — a haven for an ethnic Hazara Shiite minority that has been persecuted by extremists— appeared at risk of being completely overrun by the Taliban.

A small team of journalists from the New York Times went into Jaghori’s capital, Sang-e-Masha, on Sunday morning to report on the symbolic importance of what everyone expected to be a fierce stand against the insurgents.

Instead, bandaged commandos were found wandering the streets in apparent despair and officials discussed how they could flee an area almost entirely surrounded by the Taliban.

Officials said that more than 30 of the commandos had been killed and reporters could see, on the streets and in the hospitals, 10 other wounded commandos.

An additional 50 police officers and militiamen were also killed in the previous 24 hours, according to the militia’s commander, Nazer Hussein, who arrived from the front line with his wounded to plead for reinforcements.

“This is genocide,” Hussein said. “If they don’t do something soon, the whole district will be in the Taliban’s hands.”