Taliban militants overtook an Afghan National Army base Monday, wiping out dozens of U.S.-allied soldiers amid peace talks with the U.S.
Taliban forces killed more than a dozen Afghan military men in hours of gunfire exchange in the siege of the Bala Murghab base in Afghanistan’s western border province of Badghis. They took the remaining 40 men as prisoners of war.
The assault was the largest battle so far in the Taliban’s larger campaign to gain ground in the western half of the country. More than 70 soldiers have been killed in the last week, with the insurgency also capturing smaller outposts throughout Badghis Province, which borders Turkmenistan.
Afghanistan’s defense ministry confirmed the base’s fall to the Taliban insurgents, saying the national military had lost control of various installations in the region.
“We lost contact with all of the personnel there,” spokesman Qais Mangal said in a statement Monday. “We don’t know the casualty figures.”
The U.S. has been in a second round of peace talks with the Taliban for over two weeks, negotiations brokered by the Qatari government in the nation’s capital of Doha.
The two sides have already agreed on two major principles on which current negotiations are being built. The U.S. demanded that the Taliban not permit the nation to be used as a base for terrorism as it had been during Osama bin Laden’s reign over al Qaeda. The Taliban demanded the integrity of Afghanistan’s sovereignty, with the U.S. eventually pulling its troops from the nation.
Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s chief executive, has expressed deep concern over the talks, warning that the Taliban is using them purely for propaganda. He is urging the U.S. to include the government in Kabul in the negotiations. He has also called for the U.S. to keep a military presence in the nation until an agreement has been reached among all three parties.
“The Taliban wants to use these peace talks for political and propaganda purposes instead of using this as a step towards peace,” Abdullah said in an interview with Radio Free Europe in Kabul on Tuesday.
