Sangin, Fierce Battlefield for US Marines, on Verge of Falling to Taliban

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/sangin-fierce-battlefield-us-marines-falling-taliban/ ^ | December 21, 2015 1:03 pm | Morgan Chalfant

[UMCRevMom@aol.com]

The Taliban has for days been fighting to gain control of Sangin, a key district of the Helmand province that U.S. Marines battled to secure during the war in Afghanistan.

The Guardian reported that Taliban fighters stormed Afghan police headquarters in the district Monday morning, according to a western official, but were held off from taking control of the security building by an airstrike, likely launched by NATO.

On Sunday, deputy governor of Helmand Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar, addressing Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, wrote on Facebook that Helmand was close to collapsing amid pressure from the Taliban.

"I know that bringing up this issue on social media will make you very angry," Rasoulyar wrote. "But … Helmand stands on the brink. Ninety men have been killed in Gereshk and Sangin districts in the last two days."

According to BBC, police commander Mohammad Dawood reported being surrounded by Taliban fighters for two days, warning that Afghan police were running out of ammunition and needed immediate help.

"I have casualties lying around me; we haven't eaten for the past two days," Dawood said Sunday. "If we don't get support in the next hour or so, our fighters will be captured alive. We only have the police HQ under our control and have a battalion of the national army with us. The district office and the intelligence directorate are under enemy control."

In his Facebook post, Rasoulyar asked the Afghan president to "be quick and act" on the situation in Sangin in order to protect Helmand. The Taliban has for months been battling to retake areas of the Helmand province, its fighters taking and, in some cases, maintaining control of multiple districts.

"Helmand will collapse to the enemies and it's not like Kunduz, where we could launch an operation from the airport to retake it. That is just impossible and a dream," Rasoulyar further wrote.

The Taliban held control of Kunduz for 15 days before being driven from the northern city in mid-October, during which time the fighters destroyed government facilities, freed prisoners, and stole military equipment.

The governor of Helmand said Monday that the Afghan government forces still maintained control of the primary security buildings in the district.

Still, Nargis Rokhshani, a local council member, warned that Helmand will be in danger of falling completely to the Taliban "if the British and American forces do not help, and the government does not think about Helmand."

[WENDLE]

If it is a staging area and they attack the United States of America we simply NUKE them into oblivion. Until then I don’t give a tinkers damn about those folk. CLOSE THE DAMNED BORDERS! Save our children!!

[PLMerite]

Are those our SpecOps guys or more of theirs?

[VerySadAmerican]

My point was we haven’t been willing to do what it takes to win a war since WWII.

[lentulusgracchus]

Liberals say they recoil from the idea of mass destruction in the mode of John Foster Dulles's "massive retaliation", but their horror has more to do with Dulles's having been Republican.

Liberals didn't murmur aloud when Bill Ayers told a roomful of Leftists that America would, after the halcyon day of overthrow, have to be packed off to concentration camps for "reeducation", and that about 20,000,000 of us would have to be liquidated as irreclaimable from the toils of our patriotism and dedication to economic, personal, and political freedom. Old America, he was quite clear, could not be allowed to survive the Revolution.

I've never heard a single word of dissent or objurgation against Ayers's hateful denunciation of our patriots.

Therefore, whenever some conservative recommends massive retaliation, or even a medium-sized war, against an enemy, liberals rise as one to demand that our ROE hold harmless the civilian population of whatever country we are at war with. Not for their sake, of course, but to "educate" us "primitives" that war always means "we lose". They move the bars and change the rules, every time, to hang our side with an "L", because they hate us and intend to train us, in every venue, to walk two paces behind them, our betters, with our mouths shut.