KANDAHAR: Taliban fighters captured the strategic Afghan district of Sangin on Thursday, officials said, in another setback for Afghan forces in opium-rich Helmand province ahead of the spring fighting season.

The capture of Sangin, where US and British forces suffered heavy casualties until it was handed over to Afghan personnel, marks the culmination of the Taliban’s year-long offensive to seize the southern district and underscores their growing strength.

Most of Helmand is already estimated to be under Taliban control, with the capital Lashkar Gah — one of the last government-held enclaves — also at the risk of falling to the Taliban’s repeated ferocious assaults.

“Our forces have retreated from government offices, including the police headquarters and the governor’s office in Sangin,” Helmand governor’s spokesman Omar Zwak said. “But we are preparing to take it back.”

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that militants had overrun the district centre.

For years Helmand was the centrepiece of the western military intervention in Afghanistan, only for it to slip deeper into a quagmire of instability.

The Taliban effectively control or contest 10 of the 14 districts in Helmand, the deadliest province for British and US troops over the past decade and blighted by a huge opium harvest that helps fund the militancy.

The Pentagon has said it would deploy some 300 US Marines this spring to Helmand, where American forces were engaged in heated combat until they pulled out in 2014.

The Marines will head to the poppy-growing province this spring to assist a Nato-led mission to train Afghan forces, in the latest sign that foreign forces are increasingly being drawn back into the worsening conflict.

With US President Donald Trump yet to announce a new Afghanistan strategy, the loss of Sangin underlines the scale of the challenge facing the western-backed government and its international partners, which left Afghan forces fighting largely alone after withdrawing most combat troops in 2014.

Separately on Thursday, a policeman linked to the Taliban killed nine of his colleagues as they were sleeping in the northern Kunduz province, local police chief Aziz Kamawal said.

So-called insider attacks — when Afghan soldiers and police turn their guns on their colleagues or on international troops — have been a major problem during the more than 15-year-long war.

Last week, three US soldiers were wounded when an Afghan soldier opened fire in Helmand, in the first known insider attack on international forces this year.

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2017