Mines and militant sniper fire slowed progress in a massive US-led assault on a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, commanders said yesterday after hailing early successes.
US Marines led the charge on Marjah, a town of 80,000 in the central Helmand River valley controlled for years by militants and drug traffickers, in the first major test of US President Barack Obama’s new surge policy.
Some 15,000 US, British and Afghan soldiers stormed the Islamist stronghold in NATO’s biggest operation since overthrowing the Taliban regime in 2001.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force confirmed the combined forces had suffered two deaths — one British and one American —in the assault.
Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commander of the US Marines in southern Afghanistan, described day one of Operation Mushtarak — “together” in Dari — as “good” and said “a couple of thousand Marines” were already inside Marjah.
But as he visited a Marines base on the northeastern flank of the town, Nicholson said his men were meeting resistance from Taliban fighters.
“We took a lot of sniper fire,” he said, adding that mine-sweeping vehicles “had blown up a lot of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and have founds lots of IEDs with dead batteries.”
Militants are said to have peppered Marjah township and its surrounds with the mines, which can be almost impossible to detect.
“Yesterday we shot 17 Hellfire missiles on guys planting IEDs,” Nicholson told Marines of 1/3 Charlie Company, according to a photographer at the base.
Senior British military spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger said in London: “The key objective has been secured.”
The main aims for British troops were to secure the population centers and installations such as police stations in the Chah-e Anjir Triangle northeast of Marjah, he said.
There had been “sporadic fighting” but the Taliban appeared “confused and disjointed” and unable “to put up a coherent response,” he said.
At least 20 Taliban fighters were killed in the first hours of the assault, said General Sher Mohammad Zazai, commander of the operation’s Afghan troops.
BBC television said six of the dead militants were foreign fighters. It did not give their nationalities, but if confirmed their presence in Marjah could reflect a link between the militants and al-Qaeda.
A Taliban commander named as Mullah Abdul Rezaq Akhund condemned the Marjah assault as a public relations stunt aimed at saving face for US General Stanley McChrystal, commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan.
“Their main objective from all this propaganda is to give some prestige to the defeated and failed military commander General Stanley McChrystal, even if it is the short-term capture of a small village, and shown on Western television,” Akhund was quoted as saying in a statement e-mailed to reporters.
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