The Taliban’s First Winter Offensive: Afghan Insurgents Expanding Their Attacks on Afghan Security Forces

Rod Nordland

November 29, 2014

For Afghans, the Fighting Now Knows No Season

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents pressed government forces on several fronts on Friday, killing at least eight Afghan soldiers in three separate episodes.

The attacks continued a sudden pattern of intense assaults almost every day, in another sign that the traditional fighting season in Afghanistan, where most fighting would ordinarily have ended by November, has been prolonged this year, and is still continuing at a high tempo.

Friday’s attacks came just a day after three serious attacks around the country,including two in Kabul.

Most American 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 American-led coalition on behalf of Afghan forces have also greatly decreased in recent months.

President 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 American troops at the end of 2014. Afghan military leaders have welcomed the move, while complaining that even this year they had seen a major drop in air support of their troops.

Taliban attacks on 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 British and American troops pulled out.

The Taliban attack on Bastion began Thursday night and continued into Friday morning, according to Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial governor. Mohammad Rasoul Zazai, a spokesman for the 215th Afghan National Army Corps, now headquartered at Bastion, said it was a complex attack involving 16 insurgents, some wearing foreign military uniforms. Several of the attackers got onto the base, he added.

While the Afghan military repulsed the attack, killing five insurgents, four government soldiers were killed and seven others wounded, Mr. Zazai said. In addition, Mr. Zwak said late Friday afternoon, “a purification operation is still underway to clear out the area.”

Mr. Zwak’s and Mr. Zazai’s comments were in contrast to confident remarks made late Thursday night 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,” he said in a telephone interview. “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.”

Mr. Zazai said that a second group of insurgents had stayed hidden and renewed the attack in the early morning hours. 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 on 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, Mr. Zwak said.

In the third attack Friday, a bomb was placed in a mosque in Khogeyani District in the eastern province of Nangarhar during Friday Prayer, wounding 21 people, according to Hazrat Ali Mashreqiwal, a police spokesman in Jalalabad.

So far this year, there has been a 12 percent increase in war victims being brought to the Italian charity Emergency, which runs two hospitals and 40 clinics throughout Afghanistan treating war wounded from all sides, according to the organization’s coordinator, Emanuele Nannini.

Mr. Nannini said the organization’s hospital in southern Helmand Province was still filling 100 percent of its beds, something normally only seen 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. “The fighting season almost doesn’t end any longer.”