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The Taliban is continuing its offensive in Afghanistan, taking another district center in the southern Helmand province on Thursday while an undercover Taliban spy turned his rifle on sleeping colleagues, killing nine Afghan policemen, according to the Department of Defense. The district's police chief, Mohammad Rasoul, said the Taliban took Sangin center early Thursday morning. "The seizure of Sangin is a major tactical triumph for the Taliban," Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the U.S.-based Wilson Center, said Thursday. The insurgent group "has taken over a major urban space in one of its major stronghold provinces, amplifying the...

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...

LASHKAR GAH Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban militants have been locked in fighting with Afghan forces this week to wrest control of a southern district, provincial authorities said on Wednesday, in a struggle that has killed or wounded dozens of people. The Taliban launched its summer offensive in the middle of May and has ramped up attacks across the country, a major concern for the government, as most foreign troops leave by the end of the year. As many as 800 Taliban fighters have targeted government offices and police outposts in the Sangin district of Helmand province, said provincial government spokesman...

HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- Until five months ago, Forward Operating Base Jackson in Sangin was an island in a Taliban sea. Patrol bases were ringed by Taliban flags, about 100 to 200 meters out, to dramatize the state of siege. Everywhere beyond the main road was enemy sanctuary. Each spring the fertile land along the Helmand River bloomed red with poppies from horizon to horizon. Thirty-five drug processing labs helped fund the Taliban. In October about 1,500 Marines arrived, took the offensive, pushed into the territory -- and sustained the highest casualties of the Afghan War. During the first three...

Blog: "Report: Taliban, Not Government, Collecting Payments For Electricity Bills From Consumers In Helmand Province" SNIPPET: "The Taliban militants, not the Afghan government, are collecting payments from consumers of electricity generated from the Kajaki hydroelectric power project in the country’s southern Helmand province, according to an Afghan news website." SNIPPET: "Haji Mullah Sharafuddin, the administrative head of the Kajaki district, the Taliban have been usurping the state’s right to receive income from the huge dam in the form of bills in the Kajaki, Sangin and Zamindar districts." SNIPPET: "The Kajaki dam generates 32 megawatts of electricity, supplied not only to...

Two years ago British troops were fighting for their lives in the small Afghanistan town of Sangin, defending a compound next to the river which the Taleban were trying to overrun. They dropped 500lb (227kg) bombs metres from their own gates and regularly used hand grenades, which says a lot about the close-quarter nature of the fighting. Today Sangin bazaar is open - you can buy anything in the market - and as we walked down the main street with a patrol of British troops, locals were laying concrete by the road, improving the drains. They took us to the...

Excerpt - SANGIN, AFGHANISTAN — Shots cracked over barricades in the dark, and the night filled with sounds of men shouting and running. The defenders of a small outpost in the town of Sangin slammed mortars into firing tubes, sending up flares that cast a ghostly light over the confused scene. The smoky phosphorescence revealed British and Afghan soldiers watching nervously over the walls, toward an empty graveyard that Taliban fighters had used as cover to sneak up on a guard post. It was only a probing attack, intended to gauge the strength of the government forces now desperately holding...

The UK's Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of Task Force Helmand, was invited by Governor Wafa to address over 400 of Gereshk's influential tribal elders, called a jirga, on Thursday 10 May 2007. It was the first opportunity for the Governor and the commander to speak to the community since the start of ISAF's operation to clear the Sangin valley of senior Taliban members and foreign fighters. The jirga was also the first time in 28 years that a Helmand Governor has felt able to talk to the people without fear of being attacked by either the Russians or the Taliban....

SANGIN, Afghanistan, July 15 (UPI) -- More than 300 British troops, supported by U.S. and Canadian forces, have retaken a Taliban stronghold in Sangin, Afghanistan, military officials say. The British paratroopers stormed the stronghold in a predawn attack, about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar, after U.S. troops from the 10th Mountain Division provided a block at the south end of the town of Sangin and Canadian forces did the same at the north end, Britain's Sky News reported Saturday. Ten Taliban fighters were killed in the battle, coalition spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy said Saturday, with coalition forces suffering no casualties....

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - U.S. forces were involved in heavy fighting with Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan on Saturday but there was no immediate word on casualties, a provincial official said. Afghanistan has seen a surge in attacks by Taliban insurgents and their militant allies in recent months and the Taliban have vowed to launch a spring offensive against U.S.-led foreign forces and the Western-backed government. The clash erupted after U.S. troops backed by helicopter gunships launched an operation in the Sangin district of the southern province of Helmand, said an administrative official in the province. "It's very heavy," the...