Afghan forces step up pushback

More troops deployed as taliban advances from rural areas to key cities

Kandahar: Afghan government forces struggled against Taliban assaults on several major cities as the group stepped up a nationwide offensive that saw a key airport in the south come under rocket fire overnight.

Hundreds of commandos were deployed to the western city of Herat while authorities in the southern city of Lashkar Gah called for more troops to rein in the assaults.

Fighting has surged across the country since early May when Us-led foreign forces began a final withdrawal from Afghanistan that is now almost complete.

After seizing large tracts of rural territory and capturing key border crossings, the Taliban have started to besiege provincial capitals.

Flights out of Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city and former bastion of the Taliban, were halted after rockets struck the airport before dawn.

Airport chief Massoud Pashtun said two rockets hit the runway and repairs were underway with planes likely to resume service yesterday.

The airport is vital to maintaining logistical and air support needed to keep the Taliban from overrunning the city, while also providing aerial cover for large tracts of southern Afghanistan.

The attack came as the Taliban inched closer to overrunning at least two other provincial capitals, including nearby Lashkar Gah in Helmand province.

“Fighting is going on in the city. We have asked for special forces to be deployed there,” said Ataullah Afghan, head of the Helmand provincial council.

Afghan security forces have increasingly relied on air strikes to push the Taliban back from cities even as they run the risk of hitting civilians in heavily populated areas.

“The city is in the worst condition. I don’t know what will happen,” said Halim Karimi, a resident of Lashkar Gah, a city of 200,000 residents.

“Neither the Taliban will have mercy on us, nor will the government stop bombing.”

Further west in the city of Herat, fighting continued on the city’s outskirts overnight with air strikes targeting Taliban positions.

Herat’s provincial governor’s spokesman Jailani Farhad said that around 100 Taliban fighters had been killed in the attacks.

Forces on both sides tend to exaggerate their claims of casualties inflicted on each other’s forces and true counts are difficult to independently verify.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence said hundreds of commandos had been sent to Herat to help beat back the Taliban assault. “These forces will increase offensive operations and suppress the Taliban in Herat,” the ministry tweeted.

For months, the Taliban’s rapid territorial gains during the final stages of the US military withdrawal have largely been in sparsely populated rural areas.

But in recent weeks they have brought increasing pressure on provincial capitals and seized key border crossings.

The capture of any major urban centre would take their current offensive to another level and fuel concerns that the army is incapable of resisting the Taliban’s battlefield advances.