Taliban Kill More Than 200 Afghan Defenders on 4 Fronts: ‘a Catastrophe’
Rod Nordland, Fahim Abed and Mujib Mashal
New York Times,
August 12, 2018
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan government forces lost more than 200 officers and soldiers in fighting over the past three days as Taliban insurgents launched sustained attacks on four different fronts.
The hardest-hit area was the southeastern city of Ghazni, where more than 100 police officers and soldiers had been killed by Sunday, a hospital official said, and the insurgents appeared to be in control of most of the strategic city aside from a few important government facilities.
Ninety miles west, in Ghazni Province, the Taliban seized control of the Ajristan District. The elite army commando unit that had been defending the district disappeared for two days, and their superiors were uncertain of their fate. When they found out on Sunday, estimates of the dead ranged from 40 to 100. Twenty-two survivors were carried to safety on donkeys by rescuers who found them lost in the mountains.
In Faryab Province, 250 miles to the northwest, an isolated Afghan National Army base of 100 soldiers lost more than half of its men in a Taliban assault that ended early Sunday morning. The defenders said they did not expect to last another night.
And 275 miles east of the Faryab base, in northern Baghlan Province, at a base at Jangal Bagh on the strategic highway between Pul-i-Kumri and Kunduz, insurgents killed seven policemen and nine soldiers and captured three other soldiers on Saturday.
With the tempo of the Afghan conflict steadily increasing, it was a bad few days for the Afghan government. The fighting has demonstrated that the insurgents have a capacity for carrying out ambitious operations on multiple fronts, while the government has struggled to respond on a single front in Ghazni.
Baz Mohammad Hemat, the director of the Ghazni Hospital, said by telephone that 113 bodies had been taken to the hospital, along with 142 people who had been wounded, most of them in uniform.
“We’re running out of hospital rooms; we are using corridors and available space everywhere,” Mr. Hemat said. “Fighting is quite close to the hospital. The situation is really bad here. We’re receiving more and more wounded and dead every hour.”
The death toll appeared sure to rise, with numerous reports of bodies left unrecovered around the city. The fall of Ghazni, if it happens, would be the Taliban’s most important victory yet, as the city is on the main north-south highway, and its capture would effectively cut off the capital, Kabul, and the north from the insurgents’ Pashtun homeland in the south.
“Heavy fighting is ongoing around the governor’s office, the Police Headquarters and the compound of the intelligence agency,” said Nasir Ahmad Faqiri, a member of the provincial council. “The forces in Ghazni have resisted well, but naturally they have fought so long. The reinforcements have not done anything effective. All they have done is establish a base for themselves.”
He added, “Bodies are lying around, they have decomposed, and no one is doing anything to evacuate them.”
The Afghan minister of public health, Ferozuddin Feroz, said he had asked the International Committee of the Red Cross for “urgent help” in transporting the wounded and dead out of Ghazni.
Taliban fighters in Ghazni continued to take over guard posts that the police had abandoned. At one, an insurgent shot a black dog three times with his AK-47. Asked why, he answered that it was a police guard dog that had alerted officers when the Taliban approached in the night.
A senior Afghan official said that the authorities’ response to the Taliban attack on Ghazni had been chaotic. Police officers who had been besieged in Ghazni Prison for two days were almost out of ammunition when the Afghan National Army reached them with supplies. It turned out, however, that the army uses American ammunition, while the police use Russian ammunition. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
Col. Farid Ahmad Mashal, Ghazni’s police chief, said by telephone that reinforcements, including American troops, were beginning to clear the Taliban from the city. He said that more than 1,000 insurgents had attacked Ghazni and that 500 had been killed.
“They dreamed of repeating the fall of Kunduz here, and we sent them to their graves with those dreams,” Colonel Mashal said, referring to the northern city overrun briefly by the Taliban in 2015 and 2016.
The government in Kabul and the army continued to insist that they were in full control of Ghazni. “The strategic locations in Ghazni city are in the control of government forces,” Gen. Mohammad Sharif Yaftali, chief of staff of the Afghan National Army, or A.N.A., said at a news conference. “The governor’s office, prison, Police Headquarters and A.N.A. bases are under government control. The Taliban are settled in houses and shops of people inside the city.”
Video posted on social media sites, however, showed insurgents strolling casually around the city. Numerous local residents confirmed that militants were commandeering homes to use as bases.
A spokesman for the United States military, Lt. Col. Martin L. O’Donnell, said that 10 American airstrikes had been carried out on Sunday, five on Saturday and one on Friday. He described Ghazni as “relatively quiet” and added, “What we are seeing as the clearing operations continue is the Taliban attempting to harass Afghan forces and using civilians, who they show little regards toward, as cover.”
Colonel O’Donnell confirmed that some American troops were in Ghazni. “U.S. advisers are assisting the Afghan forces, who are leading the clearing operation,” he said.
Taliban insurgents said they had amassed forces from several provinces for the attack on Ghazni, the fourth time they have tried to capture a provincial capital, most recently in May, when they attacked Farah in western Afghanistan. Despite the large number of insurgents fighting in Ghazni city, the Taliban also mounted deadly attacks in three other parts of the country from Friday through Sunday.
In Ajristan, a district in the rugged western part of Ghazni Province about 90 miles from the city, an entire Afghan National Army commando unit disappeared for two days after the Taliban drove two bomb-laden vehicles into its base on Friday, setting off powerful explosions that destroyed the base and killed an unknown number of soldiers and policemen there, according to a senior Afghan security official. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue, said they feared that as many as 100 of the commandos and their police allies had been killed. “It was a catastrophe,” he said.
The survivors reportedly fled the base into the mountainous, arid terrain, according to Zamin Ali Hedayat, the governor of the neighboring district, Malistan. Mr. Hedayat said that 30 of the survivors — commandos and policemen — along with the local police chief, Obaidullah Khan, fled toward the Miramor District in the neighboring province of Daykondi. He said the Taliban ambushed them en route, beheading Mr. Khan and killing all 30 of the others.
There was no independent confirmation of that. The Taliban spokesman posted a Twitter message saying the Taliban had killed 43 in the Ajristan attack and took “39 hireling commandos” prisoner.
When a reporter called Mr. Hedayat to ask about the fate of the commandos, the governor said that the Afghan Ministry of Defense had just called him and asked the same thing. “I told them they did not come to my district,” he said.
Instead they were on a two-day trek to reach Miramor. Abdul Qader Haidari, the governor in Miramor, said 22 surviving commandos and policemen reached a roadless area in his district. “We went to meet them with donkeys and motorcycles,” he said. “We have them here now as our guests.”
A medic who treated them said they were in poor condition. “All of them walked for more than two days, and they didn’t know where they were going,” the medic, Nasir Akbari, said. “One of them walked barefoot all the way; others their shoes were falling apart, their uniforms were torn and in bad shape.” The survivors told him that 40 of their number had been killed in Taliban ambushes on the way, he said.
In the Faryab attack far to the north, an Afghan National Army base had been under sustained attack for three weeks in the Ghormach District when the insurgents launched a particularly heavy attack Saturday and Sunday. More than half of the 100 defenders were either killed or wounded, according to First Lt. Shah Fahim, the platoon commander whose unit was defending the base. Lieutenant Fahim said that 21 soldiers and 15 border officers had been killed and that 33 soldiers had been wounded.
His company commander, Capt. Sayid Azam, was among the dead, he said. “The base is full of wounded and dead, and the whole place is covered in blood,” Lieutenant Fahim said. “It’s a miracle we’re alive. They attacked us with 1,000 militants and all kinds of heavy equipment.”
Four days before his death, Captain Azam in Faryab spoke to a reporter by cellphone, his voice desperate and angry. “Since 20 days we are asking for help and no one is listening,” he said. “Every night fighting, every night the enemy are attacking us from three sides with rockets. We don’t know what to do.”
On Sunday, the reporter spoke by phone to Lieutenant Fahim, who said he expected a renewed attack Sunday night. “The Taliban are just on the other side of the wall,” the lieutenant said, weeping. “This may be the last time we speak.”
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