-US says Taliban attacks not affecting troops withdrawal
KABUL: Afghan security forces fought back a huge Taliban offensive in southern Helmand province in the last 24 hours, officials and residents said on Tuesday, as militants launched assaults around the country following a missed U.S. deadline to withdraw troops.
Although the United States did not meet the May 1 withdrawal deadline agreed in talks with the Taliban last year, its pull-out has begun, with President Joe Biden announcing all troops will out by Sept. 11. Critics of the decision to withdraw say the militants will try to sweep back into power.
“There was a thunderstorm of heavy weapons and blasts in the city and the sound of small arms was like someone was making popcorn,” Mulah Jan, a resident of a suburb of provincial capital Lashkar Gah, told media.
“I took all my family members to the corner of the room, hearing the heavy blasts and bursts of gunfire as if it was happening behind our walls,” he said. Families that could afford to leave had fled, but he had been unable to go, waiting with his family in fear before the Taliban were pushed back. Attaullah Afghan, the head of Helmand’s provincial council, said the Taliban had launched their huge offensive on Monday from multiple directions, attacking checkpoints around the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, taking over some of them.
Afghan security forces had launched air strikes and deployed elite commando forces to the area. The insurgents had been pushed back but fighting was continuing on Tuesday and hundreds of families had been displaced, he added.
A Taliban surge in Helmand would have particular resonance, as the opium-growing desert province was where U.S. and British forces suffered the bulk of their losses during the 20-year war.
Meanwhile, a United States Pentagon official says “small harassing attacks” by the Taliban in Afghanistan have not had a significant impact on the ongoing US and NATO troop withdrawal from the country, US media reported on Monday. The statement from Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby came shortly after the US officially began its troop withdrawal on Saturday.
“What we’ve seen are some small harassing attacks over the course of the weekend that have not had any significant impact, certainly not on our people or our resources there and bases,” Kirby told reporters on Monday. “We’ve seen nothing thus far that has affected the drawdown, or had any significant impact on the mission at hand in Afghanistan,” he said. President Joe Biden announced on April 13 that all US troops, which at the time numbered as many as 3,500, will leave Afghanistan by September 11.
Officials soon after announced that the approximately 7,000 troops in the country as part of a NATO coalition would also leave. Biden has said the US withdrawal would not be “conditions-based”, meaning the pullout is meant to continue regardless of developments on the ground. In recent weeks, the Taliban has stepped up its attacks against the US-backed Afghan government.
Meanwhile, fighting in the first quarter of 2021 saw 573 Afghan civilians killed and 1,210 wounded, a 29-percent increase from the previous year, according to the United Nations.–Agencies
