LONDON, Aug 10: British soldiers in Afghanistan are involved in some of the worst and most prolonged fighting since the Second World War, the British commander of Nato forces in the country said on Thursday.
“This sort of thing hasn’t really happened so consistently, I don’t think, since the Korean War (in 1952) or the Second World War (in 1939),” Lieutenant-General David Richards told the BBC World Service.
“It happened for periods in the Falklands (in 1982), obviously, and it happened for short periods in the Gulf on both occasions (1991 and 2003). But this is persistent, low-level, dirty fighting.”
He said some British troops would be withdrawn from parts of the southern province of Helmand to be replaced by soldiers from the Afghan Army.
Richards’s comments came after news on Wednesday that another British soldier was killed in Afghanistan, the 18th since November 2001 when the country’s troops were deployed there.
Some 4,000 British troops are in the restive southern province of Helmand, with the figure set to rise to around 4,500.
A further 1,000 are in Kabul, while a few hundred are in the southern city of Kandahar.
There are around 30,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, from 30 countries.
But in a report from Afghanistan, Britain’s domestic Press Association cited an unnamed senior British source as saying that between 40,000 and 50,000 Nato forces would be needed to control Taliban militants in Helmand alone.
