The US military conducted two airstrikes on Taliban positions in Afghanistan on Friday. The recent air strike against militant’s positions comes after concerns over the Taliban’s growing momentum in northeast Afghanistan.
Usually, a Taliban offensive in an isolated region in Afghanistan doesn’t set off an American military response. It might cause a few reverberations in Kabul, but the officials at the Pentagon are not too concerned about it.
However, this week, the Taliban won their biggest victory in decades capturing Kunduz, which is a city of 300,000 people. Emboldened with the victory, they made successful offenses in various regions in the North including the sparsely populated province of Badakhshan. The Taliban captured two districts in succession and sparked widespread fear that they were headed to the provincial capital of Faizabad.
After the withdrawal of American troops, the Taliban became more belligerent and inflicted heavy causalities against the Afghan security forces. However, until now the Taliban had not made any major assault on a major city in Afghanistan.
Taliban seems to have strengthened under the new supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour. The new supreme leader of the Taliban prevailed over his rivals after an internal power struggle to fill in the vacuum left after the demise of Mullah Muhammad Umar due to Hepatitis C in 2013.
After taking over the city of Kunduz, the Taliban were routing larger forces of Afghan soldiers and police officers that were trained by the US. They had also ramped up their fight in the traditional heartland, especially in the eastern province of Nangarhar and Helmand in the east. Officials in Bahrak, which has fallen to the Taliban, said that more than 1,000 Afghan security forces that were defending the region retreated from their position.
According to an American military spokesperson, the American 
military forces conducted airstrikes on both the regions of Baharak and its surrounding area. Residents of Baharak told in a telephone conversation that the Taliban’s shadow governor had fallen in one of the air strikes.
Meanwhile, in eastern Afghanistan, an Air Force C-130J transport plane crashed on Friday killing six US armed forces personnel, five civilian contractors, and three Afghans on the ground.
The cause of the accident is still under investigation at the moment. However, it appears that enemy fire was not involved in the crash. The 774th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron crashed right after taking off from the air base in Jalalabad.
The ongoing fighting in Kunduz has resulted in a mass exodus of Afghanis, not only from the city itself but also from surrounding areas such as Baghlan and Takhar. A state of nervousness and anxiety has settled over the residents in the capital city of northeastern province of Badakhshan.
A moderate resident of the area who was waiting for the next plane out of the city said that his children including a daughter is studying in school, which the Taliban usually target after they take control of an area. He said that he was apprehensive of the worsening situation in the area after the control of Taliban.
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