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‘The Taliban is in the City’: Secretive Raids with U.S. Forces Launched to Stop Kabul Attacks

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03.14.2018 at 09:43pm

‘The Taliban is in the City’: Secretive Raids with U.S. Forces Launched to Stop Kabul Attacks – Dan Lamothe – Washington Post

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — The United States is bolstering its efforts to help the Afghan government squash a rash of deadly high-profile attacks in its capital city through Special Operations raids, intelligence to map out residents and additional military advising, the top U.S. general here said.

Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. said that defending Kabul is the main goal for the U.S.-led military coalition right now. Although the number of bombings in the sprawling city has remained about the same, they have increased in size, he said. Hundreds of people have been killed in the past year’s blasts, terrorizing civilians and damaging embassies and other buildings.

“Yes, the Taliban is in the city,” Nicholson said. “Yes, there are facilitation networks in the city. These networks need to be identified and destroyed, and then the safe houses or whatever locations they have developed need to be identified and eliminated.”

he use of secretive U.S. Special Operations forces against networks of militants has been common from the streets of Baghdad to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. But it rarely has been discussed in Kabul before. It comes as the U.S. and Afghan governments plan to increase the number of Afghan special forces from 19,022 to 33,896 by 2020, according to a Pentagon report to Congress released in December

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