Taliban troops seized the center of Kunduz, a strategically important city in the north of Afghanistan, on Monday, an elected official said.
“The Taliban have overrun important parts of Kunduz city and taken control of the city center,” said Shukria Paiman Ahmadi, a member of parliament who represents the area. She was in the capital, Kabul, but had spoken to people in the city, she said.
A tweet from the NATO-led Resolute Support mission said there was “increased Taliban activity” in Kunduz.
Earlier in the day, both Afghan and US officials downplayed the threat.
“This time, the Taliban won’t be able to capture any part of Kunduz,” said Mahfoz Akbari, spokesman for the police in Kunduz, speaking to CNN by telephone.
Akbari was referring to the Taliban’s brief capture of the city in September 2015.
A Taliban spokesman and Afghan government officials gave similar descriptions of how militants launched a pre-dawn attack on the city from four different directions.
“Our Mujahideen are advancing rapidly inside Kunduz,” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed in a statement to CNN.
Heavy fighting continues
An aid worker living in Kunduz described an eruption of gunfire early Monday morning.
“Heavy fighting is still going on,” Ehsanullah Sadiqi told CNN, speaking by phone from Kunduz.
He said traumatic memories are still fresh for much of the city’s population after the Taliban capture of Kunduz in late September 2015.
“A lot of people who fled Kunduz last year at this time when the Taliban had taken over the city returned to Kunduz. So the number of people trying to flee again today was huge,” Sadiqi said. He described city streets that are almost completely deserted.
The US military in Afghanistan appears to be downplaying the likelihood of Kunduz falling once again.
“We are not observing evidence via our internal means to support the reports that Kunduz is under significant attack,” Brigadier General Charles Cleveland wrote in an email to CNN.
He characterized the current clashes in Kunduz as “ongoing sporadic fighting.”
The Taliban claimed Monday to have the capital cities of two southern provinces, Helmand and Uruzgan, surrounded and “under severe military operations.”
Trapped civilians
As the battle raged, Fatima Aziz, a member of the Afghan parliament from Kunduz, made a desperate appeal for help.
“We are requesting the central government and NATO to take quick action to end this battle,” Aziz told CNN.
Aziz called the current security situation “very bad” and claimed that the Taliban had cut off all the roads leading out of Kunduz, trapping its civilian population inside the city.
Longest foreign conflict in US history
The US is approaching the 15th anniversary of its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is the longest foreign conflict in US history.
The US military is reducing its footprint on the ground to roughly 8,500 troops from peaks of more than 100,000 servicemen and women just a few years ago.
But US forces have carried out more than 700 airstrikes in the first eight months of 2016 in large part to support Afghan troops on the ground.
Despite this air support, the Western-backed Afghan military is suffering some of its worst casualties yet.
“We believe that there has been a 20% increase in ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] casualties, so far this year compared to this time in 2015,” wrote Colonel Michael Lawhorn, Director of Public Affairs for US Forces Afghanistan, in an email to CNN.