Afghan security forces have been battling to push back Taliban fighters seeking to cut off the capital of the southern province of Uruzgan, officials said on Sunday as army units worked to clear roadside bombs from the main highway into the town.
The insurgents have in the past month stepped up their offensive aimed at taking control of Uruzgan, which straddles one of Afghanistan's main opium and gun-smuggling routes. Nato commanders view the rural province as a key battleground as, if it fell, the Taliban could use it as a springboard to launch attacks on Helmand and Kandahar further to the south.
The Taliban is seeking to isolate the provincial capital Tarin Kowt from outlying districts and over the past week has been fighting Afghan forces for control of the road between the town and Shawali Kot in Kandahar province.
The battle has added to the pressure on stretched security forces engaged in heavy fighting from Helmand in the south to Kunduz in the far north.
A spokesman for the Afghan army's 205th Corps said troops had reopened the route but the situation was still unstable and the road was threatened by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) planted by the insurgents.
"We launched a counter-attack that inflicted heavy casualties to the Taliban and reopened to the highway but it is heavily mined and our engineers are working to clear IEDs off the road," army spokesman Mohammad Mohsen Sultani said.
Underlining the extent of the threat, General Abdul Raziq, the Kandahar police chief who gained a fearsome reputation fighting the insurgents in his home province, has joined the battle, according to Zia Durani, a spokesman for the head of Uruzgan's provincial police.
Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, spokesman for the Nato-led Resolute Support mission in Kabul, said the situation in the province was "serious" although there did not appear to be any immediate prospect of Taliban victory.
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