US marines and Afghan troops move into Helmand with Pakistani troops on border to prevent militants from fleeing

Afghan insurgents have captured an American soldier, the US military said today, as American marines and Afghan troops poured into southern Afghanistan in the first major test of Barack Obama’s strategy to wrest the initiative from the Taliban.

US officials said the soldier had been missing since Tuesday and the military was using “all our resources to find him and provide for his safe return”.

The soldier, who went missing in eastern Afghanistan, was not taking part in the military operation launched in Helmand province.

A senior Taliban commander, Mullah Sangeen, told Reuters by telephone that the soldier was taken as a patrol walked out of its base in Paktika province. The American would be held until Taliban fighters held by US forces were released, he said.

As the offensive began, the Ministry of Defence said two British soldiers were killed in Helmand and another six Nato troops were wounded in the attack involving an improvised explosive device (IED).

One of the dead soldiers had been serving with the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, the other was a member of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment.

Daybreak brought the sporadic crackle of gunfire but no immediate heavy fighting as the offensive began shortly after 1am local time near the village of Nawa, about 20 miles south of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, where the Taliban has put up stubborn resistance against British troops for years.

Waves of helicopters landed Marines in the early morning darkness throughout the valley, a crescent of opium poppy and wheat fields criss-crossed by canals and dotted with mud-brick homes. The marines disembarked and fanned out into the fields alongside the river as the sun rose. Hundreds more raced in convoys through a barren area known as the desert of death.

In a simultaneous operation, Pakistan deployed troops on its border to stop militants fleeing into its territory.

Medical helicopters circled overhead and landed, indicating possible early casualties among the marines. A roadside bomb early in the mission wounded one marine, but he was able to continue.

The troops took many insurgents by surprise, dropping behind Taliban lines, Capt Drew Schoenmaker claimed, although this seemed unlikely as the insurgents usually have an idea of impending attacks.

“We are kind of forging new ground here. We are going to a place nobody has been before,” said Schoenmaker, 31, from the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine regiment.

As US forces began their operation, Pakistani troops moved to block Taliban fighters crossing the 1,615-mile (2,600km) border. Pakistani officers said the Pakistani army was preparing for a possible movement of Taliban from Helmand, a major opium producing area. Pakistan has been conducting its own offensive against local Taliban in the north-west in recent months.

The US operation comes ahead of the Afghan presidential elections on 20 August, which will provide a big political test for the embattled government of president Hamid Karzai, who has been under fire for failing to rein in corruption within his government.

The offensive – called Operation Khanjar, or Strike of the Sword – was described by officials as the largest and fastest-moving of the war’s new phase, involving nearly 4,000 marines and 650 Afghan forces.

As such it will provide an early test for Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The marines will be pushing into areas where Nato and Afghan troops have lacked the strength to establish a permanent presence.

“Where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces,” Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, of the Marine Corps said.

British forces led similar, but smaller, missions to clear insurgents from Helmand and neighbouring Kandahar province last week.

The Taliban has vowed that its thousands of fighters in the area would fight back, even though only minor skirmishes were reported in the early stages.

“Thousands of Taliban mujahideen are ready to fight against US troops in the operation in Helmand province,” Mullah Hayat Khan, a senior Afghan Taliban commander, told Reuters in Pakistan.

Southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold, is also an area in which the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is seeking votes from fellow Pashtun tribesmen.

The Pentagon is deploying 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in time for the elections, and expects the total number of US forces there to reach 68,000 by the end of the year.

That is double the number of troops in Afghanistan in 2008, but still half as many as are now in Iraq.

Captain Bill Pelletier, a marines spokesman, said the troops involved in the operation had been sent in by a combination of aircraft and ground transport under the cover of darkness.

Once on the ground, troops will meet local leaders, hear their needs and act on them, Pelletier said.

“We do not want people of Helmand province to see us as an enemy – we want to protect them from the enemy,” he added.

The governor of Helmand province predicted a successful operation.

“The security forces will build bases to provide security for the local people so that they can carry out every activity with this favourable background, and take their lives forward in peace,” Governor Gulab Mangal said.

In March, Obama unveiled his plans for Afghanistan, seeking to defeat al-Qaida terrorists there and in Pakistan with a bigger force and a new commander. Obama sacked General David McKiernan, replacing him with General Stanley McChrystal, a former joint special operations command chief and a counter-insurgency expert.

McChrystal, whose forces were credited with tracking down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq, was brought in to provide “fresh eyes” and “fresh thinking”.

He has already moved to lay down tighter limits on the use of air strikes to try to reduce the civilian death toll, one of the reasons attributed to a swing in support for the Taliban.