Kandahar: Army from Afghan Special Forces stopped for a brief prayer on Sunday night on a quiet highway in the southern province of Kandahar.
They do it every time they are preparing to face the Taliban guerrillas in battle.
Highly trained troops have been summoned to water the militants who attacked regular troops and local police hours before, only to find that the Taliban had disappeared into the dark leaving several civilians and injured soldiers.
“We received a report that the enemy had infiltrated here and wanted to overthrow this district,” Major Mohammad Din Bagir, a member of the Special Forces Unit deployed in the former former Taliban from Kandahar, told Reuters after surgery.
The report suggested that up to 300 Taliban fighters were present in the area, he said.
“Unfortunately, what we heard in the report and what we saw at the scene did not match.” The bag said the absence of Taliban fighters showed that claims by the group that they now controlled up to 85% of the country’s area was excessive.
It also underlines the difficulties in the face of the enemy that mixes open attacks on checkpoints, villages, cities and cities with hit-and-run tactics that tend to avoid heavy victims.
The recent territorial advantage by the Taliban came when foreign forces was led by the US military which withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, left the country’s interesting task from the security crisis that spun to local forces.
On Monday, the US general led the war in Afghanistan, Austin Miller, would let go of his order, at the symbolic end of the American longest conflict.
The Taliban Advanceskandi is one of the many provinces to see a recent surge of attacks by the Taliban, who said he wanted to be involved in running the country peacefully even though he always opposed the presence of foreign troops.
In last week the group had advanced in the west of the country near the border with Iran and had surrounded the city of Ghazni.
The special forces unit has been summoned after the rebels tried to control Khan Baba Village in the Dand Kandahar district, releasing RPGs and firefighters in Afghanistan and local police.
The soldiers traveled there under the cover of darkness, using Night Vision equipment and moved in a Humvee vehicle that was injured with a bullet hole from the previous mission, some of them were done with US allies.
When they arrived, they found the village mostly abandoned.
The air strike by the Afghan Air Force has helped push the Taliban fighters.
Special army personnel moved quickly and quietly from home to the house, entering the door and jumped the wall to find the remnants of Taliban who might still hide in the area.
They only found several local residents of the elderly who said that other residents had fled when the battle began.
Troops also tend to be soldiers injured in previous clashes before evacuating them to the nearest military base.
In the distance a sporadic shot was heard.
A Afghan defense official said on Twitter on Monday that 26 rebels were killed in operations and air strikes the day before in two Kandahar Regency, including Dand.
Reuters cannot verify independently.
After the operation is complete, special troops are caught short, before preparing to receive orders for the next mission.