The last time British forces fought in Sangin they came to regard the isolated Afghan town – to quote the phrase coined by one senior SAS officer – as “hell in a small place”. Despite having a population of just 14,000 souls, Sangin’s central location in Afghanistan’s highly profitable opium trade meant its Taliban masters were never going to relinquish control without a fight. And so it proved. When British troops tried to take control of the town as part of Britain’s military intervention to bring security to Afghanistan’s lawless Helmand province, they found themselves in a desperate battle. More than 100 British service personnel lost their lives, with hundreds more suffering serious injury, in the decade-long struggle to wrest the town from the Taliban.
By the mission’s end, when responsibility for holding Sangin had been handed over to the US Marines, the Taliban had been roundly defeated and the town firmly re-established under the control of the Afghan government in Kabul. This was reflected during last year’s presidential elections when the Taliban attempted to intimidate the local population against voting by threatening to cut off the fingers of anyone who enrolled on the electoral register. Rather than submitting to the Taliban’s threats, local elders told the Taliban they were not welcome, and the population demonstrated its preference for democratic government through its high turn-out at the polls.
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