A traditional easing in fighting during the freezing winter months has been absent this year as the Taliban and Islamic State group respond to intensifying US and Afghan air assaults. “The gloves are off,” Brig Gen Lance Bunch, who directs future air operations in Afghanistan, told reporters recently. The new policy has “definitely been a game-changer and the Taliban is definitely feeling it”, he added. “The days of old where you had fighting seasons are gone,” Maj Gen James Hecker, head of Nato’s Air Command in Afghanistan, told AFP in Kabul last week. The escalation of the conflict foreshadows a “particularly bloody year”, Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Centre in Washington, DC told AFP, forecasting more Afghan and US casualties.

Source: Dhaka Tribune February 11, 2018 05:48 UTC