The Taliban has tried repeatedly this summer to capture a significant urban area from the government. They came close to taking the city of Kunduz in April and in June but were driven back. Now they have Musa Qala.
The Taliban need a psychological win to reassert their dominance from the challenge of Isis and to distract from recent bad publicity over their failure to admit the death of their reclusive leader Mullah Omar.
Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, who now claims the leadership, is likely to benefit from the fall of Musa Qala — he is a local son from the Sangin area.
Musa Qala is a deeply unfriendly place to almost anyone who wasn’t born there, other Afghans included. It is a key processing and trafficking hub for the opium and heroin trades and a focal point for a longstanding Helmand-based tribal war.
How much enthusiasm the Afghan government will have for trying to retake it remains to be seen.
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In 2006 British forces were drawn into trying to hold Musa Qala at the behest of the provincial governor at the time. A hundred-strong force of British troops held out for four months against massed Taliban assaults. Water and ammunition almost ran out. The exhausted soldiers renamed the district centre The Alamo, or more expressively “Camp Shithole”.
Eventually British commanders agreed to a dubious deal offered by local tribes to police the area themselves if British forces left. The Taliban quickly moved in and held Musa Qala for ten months until a massive British and American assault reclaimed it in December 2007.