Elite troops to push back Taliban in opium-rich Helmand capital

Commandos have been deployed to Lashkar Gah to stop a Taliban advance.

Afghan National Army commandos open fire on a Taliban position in Helmand province.

More than 300 Afghan commandos have been deployed to the city of Lashkar Gah to stop a Taliban advance after 14 people were killed in a militant attack.

The dead included 10 police officers, and the suicide attack raised fears over the Taliban offensive to capture the strategically important capital of opium-rich Helmand province.

Taliban fighters, who have surrounded the city for weeks, attacked police checkpoints across the city on Monday.

“More than 300 commandos ... have been deployed to the city to prevent Taliban advancement,” Abdul Jabar Qahraman, special envoy for security in Helmand, said yesterday.

Provincial spokesman Omar Zwak said the commandos were sent from Kabul and neighbouring provinces to launch a “clearance operation” in Lashkar Gah.

“Soon the security forces will clear the whole city from Taliban,” he said.

But officials in the city are pessimistic of holding out the insurgents. Thousands of people have fled the city, while thousands more, who moved to the capital to escape fighting in other areas, were trapped yesterday.

“If we don’t receive support from the central government, the province will collapse soon,” provincial council chief Karim Atal said.

If captured, Lashkar Gah would be the second provincial capital the Taliban has held since it was toppled by the coalition campaign in 2001. Insurgents briefly held the northern city of Kunduz last October before being driven out by US-backed Afghan troops. Heavy fighting is again taking place in Kunduz.

The Taliban is also threatening the gates of Tarin Kowt, the capital of Oruzgan, where Australia’s troops were based during the war in Afghanistan.

Capturing provincial capitals appears to be a Taliban strategy to weaken the Afghan government, which is a split between the President Ashraf Ghani and the country’s CEO, Abdullah Abdullah.

Speculation persists in Kabul that former president Hamid Karzai is lobbying to return.

“The national unity government has stagnated, and that stagnation has created a vacuum. The political basis of the government is shrinking on a daily basis, and I don’t see any chance of that being reversed,” Davood Moradian, director of the Afghan Institute of Strategic Studies, told The Wall Street Journal. “There are two forces that can fill that vacuum — one is the Taliban, and the other is President Karzai.”

The assault on Lashkar Gah comes just a week after representatives of 70 nations met in Brussels and pledged almost $US20 billion ($26bn) in aid to prop up Afghanistan until 2020.

“We’re buying four more years for Afghanistan,” said EU special representative Franz-Michael Mellbin following the meeting in Brussels.

The UN said more than 10,000 refugees had arrived in Kabul and other centres.

Additional reporting: Agencies