[USNEWS] Afghan forces on Friday routed the Taliban from a large swath of a key southern province that has long been an important myrmidon stronghold, in their first major solo operation since international combat forces pulled out of the country, an American general and a senior Afghan police officer said.
The operation, which began Feb. 10, succeeded in clearing snuffies out of Sangin district in Helmand
...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan...
province, said Maj. Gen. Kurt Fuller, deputy chief of staff for U.S. and NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
operations in Afghanistan.
The area has long been an important Taliban stronghold and a major poppy-producing region but on Friday, Afghan forces "secured Sangin and the whole district has been cleared," Fuller told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named.
Fuller said the Afghan forces ran into "four strong points that the Taliban just didn't want to give up and it took them a while" to seize those, including a school that had been booby-trapped with explosives.
The Taliban have had intermittent control of large parts of Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province since they were driven from power in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001, after the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States.
The operation that secured Sangin also cleared the snuffies from large parts of the Helmand River valley, which has long supplied most of the world's heroin, through Taliban-financed poppy production.
Much of the Taliban presence in the region is meant to protect supply routes for drugs, which fund the insurgency, and arms. Taliban leaders are believed to be based over the border in Pakistain.
Fuller said that far from a previous reputation as incompetent, the Afghan cops proved able to coordinate across all formats, including police, border police, special forces and intelligence. 
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