Helmand Province Campaign - Prelude

Prelude

In 2006, a revitalised Taliban conducted a number of large-scale military offensives against coalition troops in Helmand, Kandahar and other provinces on the border with Pakistan.

In Helmand, the Afghan government only had a tenuous hold outside the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. The NATO presence in the province was sparse, limited to 130 American soldiers undertaking punctual anti-terrorist missions, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Through the month of April, a new British unit, the Helmand Task Force, was deployed in order to counter the Taliban. The core of the fighting force was drawn from the 16th Air Assault Brigade, and in particular from the 3rd battalion, of the Parachute Regiment. Based out of Camp Bastion, then under construction, the task force numbered 3,300 men, though only a third of these were combat troops.

During the first four months of its presence in Afghanistan, the Helmand Task Force was expected to take part in Operation Enduring Freedom, and help track down Taliban and Al Qaeda extremists. It was thus placed under the command of U.S. Major General Benjamin Freakley, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 76. But being part of ISAF, it was also answerable to the ISAF Regional Command South, then led by a Canadian, Brigadier General David Fraser. This tangled chain of command was accompanied by a certain difficulty in defining the priority between two different and sometimes contradictory missions: either to win the support of the local population, or to fight and eliminate the Taliban.