Britain to hand over violent Afghan area to US troops

[David]

LONDON (AFP) – British troops will hand over control of the violence-wracked Sangin area of southern Afghanistan to US forces by the end of the year, Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced on Wednesday.

British forces have suffered their heaviest losses in Sangin with almost 100 deaths in the market town and surrounding areas -- nearly a third of their total casualties since military involvement in Afghanistan began in 2001.

The government was keen to portray the move as a logical redeployment, but the Taliban insurgency claimed credit for the change and warned that the US troops set to take over in Sangin would face "the same fate."

Fox said the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would restructure its operations in southern Afghanistan "so that it can consolidate a US Marine brigade in northern Helmand which will assume responsibility for security in Sangin later this year.

"This will simplify current command arrangements and enable UK troops to be redeployed to reinforce progress in the key districts of central Helmand," he told the House of Commons.

About 1,000 Royal Marines are expected to leave Sangin and be redeployed to central Helmand by the end of the year.

Fox stressed that the move was not an admission of defeat but a sensible reorganisation of British forces because there were now more US troops available in the area following President Barack Obama's troop surge.

He argued that British troops had made "huge progress in the face of great adversity" in Sangin, a particularly hazardous town because it is a battleground for tribal rivalries and a major opium-growing centre.

But Fox added that he and Prime Minister David Cameron had argued when they were in opposition that British troops in Helmand were "too thinly spread and we had insufficient force densities for effective counter-insurgency."

The arrival of the US troop surge "is allowing us to deliver a better and more realistic distribution of tasks within the international coalition," Fox said.

Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, deputy commander of US forces and head of ISAF Joint Command, said the move would "clean up the command and control."

He told reporters via video link from Kabul that it would "continue to build on the gains in the Sangin area that the Brits have done over the last several years."

However, the Taliban claimed the British troops were pulling out of Sangin because of pressure from the militants' attacks.

"This is the start of the British forces' defeat in Afghanistan," Yousuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman said, reading what he said was a statement by Mullah Omar, the militant group's fugitive leader.

"We defeated them in Sangin. They'll be defeated in the rest of the country soon," Ahmadi told AFP in Kabul.

He said the American troops set to take over in Sangin "will face the same fate. We'll defeat the Americans as well there."

Earlier, former British army officer Patrick Mercer, a lawmaker for the governing Conservative Party, said the handover should under no circumstances be considered a retreat.

"Any suggestion that British forces are being beaten out of Sangin or returning with their tails between their legs is not just disingenuous, it's actually disgusting," he told the BBC.

Cameron told lawmakers that 2010 was the "key year" for the mission in Afghanistan.

He said: "We have set out very clearly what we want to achieve in Afghanistan. This is the key year where we surge up the military forces, we surge up political pressure."

Britain has 8,000 troops in Helmand, the lion's share of its 9,500-strong force in Afghanistan, which comes under the command of ISAF.