US troops in Afghanistan have rushed to help members of the Daesh terrorist group following a Taliban operation to purge the terrorists from the country’s east, according to Taliban militants.
The Taliban militant group said in a statement on Friday that US soldiers “saved” Daesh members as well as their local leaders by helicopters from a siege they had been trapped in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar.
“The US troops saved them from the siege by helicopters,” the statement said, adding that the Taliban had been launching an anti-Daesh operation for one week in Kunar and had surrounded the terrorist outfit’s important individuals.
A large number of the Daesh fighters were reportedly rescued by choppers while fleeing a battlefield with Taliban last year in the northern province of Jawzjan.
The Economic Times estimated in a recent report that around 10,000 members of the terrorist group were present in Afghanistan and the number was growing under the close watch of Washington.
In recent years, Daesh has established a foothold in eastern and northern Afghanistan. The terrorist group has mostly been populating Nangarhar, from where it has carried out high-profile brutal attacks in major population centers across the country.
Last February, three months after the group’s defeat was announced in Iraq and Syria, the Associated Press reported that the US military was pulling its forces from a base in Iraq and shifting them to Afghanistan.
The report flew in the face of US President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to end Washington’s Afghanistan intervention.
The US and its allies sent troops to Afghanistan and toppled a ruling Taliban regime some 17 years ago. That ongoing war has failed to bring stability to the country despite the presence of thousands of foreign forces.
Today, around 14,000 US troops remain in Afghanistan, half of them assigned to what Washington insists are counter-terrorism missions.
According to an official US report last year, the central government in Kabul is currently controlling a little more than 50 percent of the country, down from 72 percent in 2015, with the rest remaining in Taliban’s control.
