US-led forces will launch "decisive operations" to reclaim two southern Afghan towns captured in recent days by the Taliban, the military said yesterday.
Scores of Taliban militants chased police out of two towns in Helmand Province near the Pakistan border. A senior Afghan official accused two Pakistani Islamic groups of aiding the militants.
"The Taliban extremists have taken control of the areas of Garmser and Naway-i-Barakzayi. However, coalition forces do have them under observation," military spokesman Colonel Tom Collins told reporters in Kabul.
"Decisive operations will begin soon," he added, without saying when.
However, Deputy Interior Minister Abdul Malik Sidiqi said government forces had already retaken control of Naway-i-Barakzayi late on Monday.
It wasn't immediately possible to explain the discrepancy between his information and the coalition spokesman's.
A US official said the battlefield situation was fluid, and details on Naway-i-Barakzayi's return to government control may have not yet reached US forces.
While Taliban militants have long operated freely in their former strongholds in the southern provinces, their ability to capture towns highlights the weakness of Afghanistan's police forces in remote areas, and the challenge ahead faced by international forces to restore order in the country.
"The Taliban have reconstituted and dispersed, but this is certainly not about the Taliban being strong," Collins said. "The reality is that the government has not yet extended to the far-reaching areas of the country."
Helmand Province's deputy governor said at least 400 Afghan soldiers, backed by coalition troops, were heading to Garmser to wrest it back from the Taliban, who overran it on Sunday.
Afghan officials have said scores of Taliban fighters, many crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan, fought Garmser's small contingent of policemen, holed up in a concrete compound, for 16 days before the police withdrew.
Sidiqi accused Pakistan-based Islamic groups Lashkar-e-Tayyaba -- an outlawed militant organization -- and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a pro-Taliban political party, of taking over Garmser.
"They burned the Afghan flag and raised the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam flag," Sidiqi told reporters. "The government of Afghanistan has technically and temporarily left Garmser. We did so to prevent casualties to civilian people."
But in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, Jamiat spokesman Riaz Durrani dismissed Afghan claims that his group's members were involved in the Helmand fighting.
"We are not helping any militant group in Afghanistan against [President] Hamid Karzai's government, but the fact is that he has failed to restore order," Durrani said.
Helmand is one of Afghanistan's most volatile regions, where Taliban extremists and heavily armed drug traffickers have long operated freely.
More than 10,000 US, British, Canadian and Afghan soldiers are taking part in an anti-Taliban offensive across southern Afghanistan.
About 4,000 British troops, part of an expansion of NATO forces into the region, are deploying to Helmand Province to take control at the end of the month from US forces. They have figured prominently in fierce fighting in the province in recent weeks.
Afghanistan's violence is the deadliest since the Taliban's 2001 ouster, with more than 800 people, mainly insurgents, killed since May, according to an Associated Press tally based on coalition and Afghan figures.
The US military, however, said Operation Mountain Thrust has "seriously disrupted" the Taliban network in southern Afghanistan.
"Afghan and coalition forces have killed numerous low- and mid-level commanders that the senior Taliban leadership rely on to intimidate villages, threaten elders and lead small bands of extremists to conduct attacks on Afghan and coalition forces," US spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Paul Fitzpatrick said.
In other violence, suspected Taliban extremists killed two Afghan policemen in an execution-style shooting yesterday and wounded another in southeastern Ghazni province's Gelan district, police said.
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