8 Afghan troops slain in assaults
KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents pressed government forces on several fronts Friday, killing at least eight Afghan soldiers in three separate attacks.
The country has seen a sudden pattern of intense assaults almost every day. While the traditional fighting season in Afghanistan would ordinarily have ended by November as the harsh Afghan winter sets in, it has been prolonged this year and is still continuing at a high tempo.
Friday’s attacks came just a day after three major
attacks around the country, including two in Kabul.
Most U.S. and NATO troops have ceased combat operations, and the Taliban have boasted that this has given them an increased ability to assault Afghan government forces. Air support and medical evacuation missions run by the U.S.-led coalition on behalf of Afghan forces have also greatly decreased in recent months.
President Barack Obama has authorized the use of air support and other combat support activities to help the Afghans in 2015, reversing an earlier plan to end all combat activity by U.S. troops at the end of 2014. Afghan military leaders have welcomed the move, complaining that even this year they had seen a major drop in air support of their troops.
Taliban attacks Thursday and Friday on Camp Bastion, in southern Helmand province, were symbolic as well as deadly. Bastion, a former British base and airfield, was turned over to the Afghan National Army’s 215th Corps this year as its contingent of British and U.S. troops pulled out.
The Taliban attack on Bastion began Thursday night but continued into Friday morning, said Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial governor.
Mohammad Rasoul Zazai, a spokesman for the 215th Afghan National Army Corps in Bastion, said it was a complex attack involving 16 insurgents, some wearing foreign military uniforms. Several of the attackers got onto the base before they were subdued, he said.
While the Afghan military beat back the attack, killing five insurgents, four government soldiers were killed and seven others wounded, Zazai said. In addition, Zwak said late Friday, “a purification operation is still underway to clear out the area.”
Zwak’s and Zazai’s comments were in contrast to confident remarks made Thursday by Lt. Gen. Haji Mahmood, the 215th Corps’ deputy commander, that the insurgents had been quickly subdued.
“A group of terrorists tried to enter the base, but you see they were not aware that there is a force here that is not only responsible to defend itself but also responsible to defend the entire country,” he said. “We have just killed four of them and the rest retreated. Their dead bodies are lying in front of me. We do not have any casualties, deaths or injuries.”
Zazai explained that a second group of insurgents had stayed hidden and renewed the attack in the early morning hours. In all, he said, the insurgents used seven suicide bombers in the attack.
Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, the spokesman for the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, took responsibility for the attack and claimed that the insurgents had managed to damage aircraft as well as kill unspecified numbers of defenders.
Also Friday, the insurgents attacked the headquarters of the paramilitary Afghan National Army Civil Order Police in Now Zad District of Helmand province, ramming the gate of their base with an explosives-filled truck that then detonated, killing four officers and wounding five others, Zwak said.
In the third attack Friday, a bomb was placed in a mosque in Khogeyani District in the eastern province of Nangarhar during prayers, wounding 21 people, said Hazrat Ali Mashreqiwal, a spokesman for police headquarters in Jalalabad. The motive for the attack was unclear.
So far in 2014 there has been a 12 percent increase in war victims being taken to the Italian charity Emergency, which runs two hospitals and 40 clinics throughout Afghanistan treating war wounded from all sides, said the organization’s coordinator, Emanuele Nannini.
Nannini said the organization’s hospital in southern Helmand province was still filling 100 percent of its beds, something normally seen only at the peak of the fighting season in July and August. The Kabul hospital is at 85 percent capacity.
“It’s getting much worse,” he said. “Before it was much more hit and run; now they are fighting face to face. The fighting season almost doesn’t end any longer. There are only a couple months off, January and February.”
The trend toward longer fighting seasons has been seen for several years, along with an increase in casualties. Emergency, which treats mainly victims with penetrating traumatic injuries — from bullets, bombs and knives — has recorded a 64 percent increase in patients since 2012, Nannini said, although part of that increase was because the organization expanded its capacity.
In southern Helmand province, the Taliban insurgents continue to press government-held areas in the north of the province, including Sangin and Musa Qala districts, both of which were in danger of falling to Taliban offensives during the summer.
Fighting is still continuing at a high level even now in northern Helmand, according to Afghan officials and local residents, resulting in most of the increase in war wounded arriving at the Lashkar Gah hospital.
Across Afghanistan, the fighting has exacted a heavy toll this year, with some 6,000 soldiers and policemen losing their lives from late March through October, far more than in previous years.
Information for this article was contributed by Taimoor Shah and Khalid Alokozai of The New York Times.