KABUL (AFP) — Insurgents in a stronghold in southern Afghanistan are fleeing a weeks-old NATO operation, perhaps to sanctuaries across the border, as troops take more ground, the alliance force said Monday.
British troops and US Marines launched late April the operation in Garmser district, a Taliban logistics hub on the southern border with Pakistan and from where rebels are said to move northwards to feed an insurgency.
The chief of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, said Afghan and international reports from the area said insurgents in Garmser "are trying to flee to the south, perhaps to go back into sanctuaries in another country."
He did not say which country, but he was likely referring to Pakistan where extremists including from Al-Qaeda are said to have camps.
The Garmser operation had "pretty good momentum" but there was more work to be done, the International Security Assistance Force commander told reporters in Kabul.
ISAF said separately that the troops had secured new areas in Garmser, which is in the southern province of Helmand.
"ISAF forces have consistently encountered, and defeated, disorganised resistance in more than a hundred engagements with insurgents in the form of small arms, indirect fire and rocket-propelled grenades," it said.
Soldiers from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit deployed to Afghanistan in March to help out ISAF troops in the volatile south, which sees the worst of an insurgency launched after the Taliban were removed from government in 2001.
Hundreds of Taliban attacked a remote Afghan police base overnight leading to fierce battles that left about 50 rebels dead, most in NATO air strikes, Afghan authorities said Monday.
The insurgents stormed police in a district on the border with Turkmenistan in Badghis province, they said.
"Yesterday, about 300 to 400 Taliban attacked our police posts in Bala Murghab district," deputy provincial governor Abdul Ghani Saber said.
"With the help of coalition air support, we killed about 55 Taliban," Saber added.
The interior ministry in Kabul said about 48 Taliban were killed and more than 36 wounded in the fighting. Most were killed in international military air strikes, it said in a statement.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed it had sent planes to strike the area but said its information was that 10 insurgents had been killed.
"There was an attack on a police station and we supported with air power during the night. As far as we know, we have 10 insurgents killed," an official said.
The area is remote and it was impossible to independently verify the death toll.
The Taliban were in government between 1996 and 2001, when they were ousted in an invasion led by the United States weeks after the 9/11 attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda leaders who then had bases in Afghanistan.
They are waging an intensifying insurgency that is focused on the southern and eastern borders with Pakistan, where militants are alleged to have sanctuaries.
But the west, including Badghis and the neighbouring province of Farah, has seen a spike in unrest in recent months.
In the latest in dozens of suicide attacks this year, a car bomb exploded near a military convoy of international forces in the western province of Herat killing only the attacker, a police commander named Abdul Shukur said.
Two NATO soldiers were killed in a suicide car bomb explosion in the eastern city of Jalalabad at the weekend.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
