"These claims are absolutely false," Zamir Kabulov, head of the Russian foreign ministry's department responsible for Afghanistan and the Kremlin's special envoy in the country, told RIA Novosti state news agency.

"These fabrications are designed, as we have repeatedly underlined, to justify the failure of the US military and politicians in the Afghan campaign. There is no other explanation."

In a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Scaparrotti said Moscow was "perhaps" supplying the Taliban.

In February General John Nicholson, the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, testified that Russia is encouraging the Taliban and providing them with diplomatic cover in a bid to undermine US influence and defeat NATO.

Kabulov in 2015 said that Russia was exchanging information with the Taliban and saw shared interest with them when it comes to fighting the ISIS.

Russia considers the Taliban a terrorist group and it is banned in the country, along with the ISIS.

Taliban fighters on Thursday captured Afghanistan's strategic district of Sangin, where US and British forces suffered heavy casualties until it was handed over to Afghan personnel.</s>Airman 1st Class Jesse Johnson, a member of the U.S. Air Force's Fly-Away Security Team at Bagram Air Field, provides perimeter security for a C-130J Super Hercules on the flight line at Camp Shorab in Afghanistan's volatile Helmand province, on Sept. 23, 2016.

WASHINGTON — The United States won't attend a multinational peace conference on Afghanistan next month in Russia, a State Department official said Thursday.

The reasons: The U.S. wasn't consulted before receiving the invitation and doesn't know Russia's objectives for the gathering.

The official said that Washington wants to work with Moscow on regional efforts to end the 16-year war, and that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would bring up the matter when he visits Russia in April. The official wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India and several Central Asian nations are among the invitees to the Moscow conference. Afghan and U.S. officials say the Taliban aren't invited. The State Department hasn't publicly announced its position on the planned conference.

Last year, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and the United States met to jump-start the peace process but that effort faltered.

The official said the U.S. wants nations in the region, which have a shared interest in peace in Afghanistan, to increase pressure on the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan government.

Last week, Pakistani officials hosted seven Taliban leaders in Islamabad to try to press the insurgents into peace talks ahead of the Moscow meeting, two Taliban officials told the AP.

Islamabad has been under international pressure to try to bring Taliban leaders, who have lived in Pakistan since their rule in Afghanistan was overthrown in the 2001 U.S. invasion, into some form of negotiations with Kabul.

In Washington on Tuesday, Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani called for the U.S. to add to the 8,400 troops currently in Afghanistan — where the Taliban have stepped up attacks and the Islamic State group also poses a threat.

He said the Afghan government remains open to peace talks but doubted the Taliban would participate unless Pakistan cracked down on "terrorist safe havens" on its soil — a long-running source of bitterness between the neighboring countries.</s>NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe has said that Russia may be helping to supply Taliban militants that are fighting Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government.

U.S. Army General Curtis Scaparrotti told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on March 23 that he has seen evidence of increasing Russian efforts to influence the Taliban "and perhaps even to supply" the militant group.

Scaparrotti, a four-star general who previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, did not specify what types of supplies he thought Russia might be providing the Taliban.

Taliban officials have told Reuters they have had significant contacts with Moscow since at least 2007 but said Russian involvement did not extend beyond "moral and political support."

U.S.-led forces have been battling the Taliban since driving them and their Al-Qaeda allies out of power following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP</s>Russia on Friday denied allegations by the commander of NATO that Moscow may be assisting the Taliban as the insurgents fight US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

"These claims are absolutely false," Zamir Kabulov, head of the Russian foreign ministry's department responsible for Afghanistan and the Kremlin's special envoy in the country, told RIA Novosti state news agency.

"These fabrications are designed, as we have repeatedly underlined, to justify the failure of the US military and politicians in the Afghan campaign. There is no other explanation."

NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, US General Curtis Scaparrotti, who also heads the US military's European Command, told lawmakers in Washington on Thursday that he had witnessed Russia's influence grow in many regions, including in Afghanistan.

In a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Scaparrotti said Moscow was "perhaps" supplying the Taliban.

In February General John Nicholson, the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, testified that Russia is encouraging the Taliban and providing them with diplomatic cover in a bid to undermine US influence and defeat NATO.

Kabulov in 2015 said that Russia was exchanging information with the Taliban and saw shared interest with them when it comes to fighting the Islamic State jihadist group.

Russia considers the Taliban a terrorist group and it is banned in the country, along with the Islamic State group.

Taliban fighters on Thursday captured Afghanistan's strategic district of Sangin, where US and British forces suffered heavy casualties until it was handed over to Afghan personnel.</s>Image copyright AP Image caption Russia may be supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan, a US general has said

Russia has denied a top Nato general's allegation it may be secretly sending supplies to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Gen Curtis Scaparrotti told lawmakers in Washington on Thursday that Moscow was "perhaps" supplying the extremist group.

On Friday, Zamir Kabulov, the Kremlin's special envoy in Afghanistan, said the allegation was "absolutely false".

Russia has previously said its limited contact with the Taliban is aimed at bringing them to the negotiating table.

Moscow considers the Taliban a terrorist organisation, and backed the Northern Alliance against the group in the civil war of the 1990s.

But in December 2015 it did concede "the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours" in Russia's fight against so-called Islamic State.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Afghan security forces pictured during a battle with the Taliban

However, Gen Scaparrotti, Nato's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: "I've seen the influence of Russia of late - increased influence in terms of association and perhaps even supply to the Taliban."

He gave no further information to back up the allegation.

Russia's surprising new ally: By Dawood Azami, BBC World Service

Softening its approach towards the Afghan Taliban is a dramatic and somewhat unexpected shift for Russia. But ties have improved over the past year, with several Russian officials publicly acknowledging Moscow's "contacts" with the Taliban.

They cite two reasons: ensuring the security of Russian citizens and political offices in areas where the Taliban has recently expanded its territorial control; and countering IS, which established its regional branch in Afghanistan in January 2015.

The Afghan Taliban's assurances it will keep IS away from Russia's borders and those of other regional players, including Iran and China, have proved particularly important. But this new softening has led a number of high ranking American military officials to accuse Russia of undermining the Afghan government and its US/Nato allies and "legitimizing" the Taliban.

Western officials also say that Russia is using the emergence of IS in Afghanistan as an excuse to justify its meddling in the country. Meanwhile, Afghan officials have repeatedly reminded Moscow that instead of establishing links with non-state actors, it should work with the government for regional peace and stability.

The comments came a month after the US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan said Russia was encouraging the Taliban and providing them with diplomatic cover in a bid to undermine US influence and defeat Nato.

But Mr Kabulov told RIA Novosti state news agency on Friday: "These fabrications are designed, as we have repeatedly underlined, to justify the failure of the US military and politicians in the Afghan campaign. There is no other explanation."</s>Russia may be influencing and supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan, the top U.S. general in Europe told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, NBC News reported.

Russia has largely been absent in Afghanistan since the Soviet Union's disastrous war there in the 1980s, but its role seems to be growing today, said Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who also serves as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, according to Reuters.

"I've seen the influence of Russia of late — increased influence in terms of association and perhaps even supply to the Taliban," Scaparrotti said.

His testimony comes in the wake of the Taliban's reported capture of the hotly contested town of Sangin in Afghanistan on Thursday.</s>Mansour, who was deputy to the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, is widely seen as close to neighbouring Pakistan's powerful military intelligence, which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s and has maintained links ever since.

That would suggest he was in favour of nascent peace talks with the Afghan government that Pakistan has strongly backed, and Mansour has endorsed negotiations previously.

Yet his first speech since being named leader last week was an appeal to Taliban commanders opposed to negotiating with President Ashraf Ghani's government in Kabul, which they see as a vassal of the West that must be overthrown.

"This is propaganda of the enemy," he said. "Jihad will continue till an Islamic Sharia system is enforced in the country."

Experts believe it would be premature to read too much into those comments.

"If he's playing to his own audience and trying to consolidate his position, it wouldn't make much sense to make announcements about seeking peace at the moment, as the peace talks issue is a make-or-break point within the Taliban," said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul.

With a touch of diplomacy, Mansour added: "We have to be patient and tolerant and bow our heads before other colleagues and then we will succeed. We should not impose our wishes on others."

Born around 50 years ago in the southern Afghan region of Kandahar, Mansour studied in religious schools there and in northwestern Pakistan, interrupting his studies to fight after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Taliban sources said.

He became close to Omar, the movement's late founder, being appointed aviation minister after the Taliban wrested control of Afghanistan from feuding warlords in 1996 and eventually rising to become his deputy.

Mansour's ties with Pakistan mean its intelligence service, the ISI, almost endorsed his recent appointment to succeed Omar, according to analysts.

"He would not have become the new head of the Taliban unless the ISI wanted him to be the head of the Taliban," said Bruce Riedel, a former senior official at the CIA and currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

That relationship with Pakistan has seen Mansour branded as a tool of the ISI by adversaries chafing at Islamabad's longstanding influence over the Taliban leadership.

Little is known of him personally.

Mansour has never given an interview to the press, and in 2010 media reported that negotiators in Kabul who had thought they were meeting him in secret peace talks had, in fact, been talking to a grocer impersonating the Taliban No. 2.

After being captured and imprisoned in Pakistan when the Taliban government was toppled in 2001, Mansour was repatriated and resumed his career in 2006, rising steadily through the group's ranks as other commanders were eliminated.

According to the United Nations Security Council, which put him on a list of Taliban officials targeted with sanctions, he mixed drug trafficking with other operations in the eastern provinces and was a top recruiter of anti-government fighters.

By 2010, he had joined the main leadership council and is widely considered to have been the effective head of the movement since Omar's death, which Afghanistan's intelligence agency says happened more than two years ago.

Ruttig, who met Mansour in 2000 when he was serving as aviation minister in the Taliban government, said he had the impression of an intelligent man with a sharp mind who was ready to talk at much more length than some of his colleagues.

He helped oversee the opening of a Taliban office in the Qatari capital of Doha in 2013, underscoring perceptions that he was a pragmatist generally in favour of at least limited contact with the outside world.

The fact that he released his first public comments via Facebook also suggests a leader more comfortable with modern methods of communication than the famously secretive Omar.

Confirmation of Omar's death last week cleared up some confusion over his fate, but also brought deep divisions within the Taliban out into the open.

On Tuesday, Taliban official Syed Mohammad Tayab Agha announced he was resigning as director of the Political Office in Doha, set up to enable the Taliban to negotiate peace, because he disagreed with the way the succession was handled.

As well as disharmony over the peace process, tensions also centre on rivalries between the Pashtuns of Mansour's southern region of Kandahar and those in eastern Afghanistan.

Small but increasing numbers of fighters are exchanging the white flag of the Taliban for the black insignia of the more brutal Islamic State, and the two groups have clashed.

That adds a new and unpredictable element to Afghanistan's insurgency, which, for all the infighting within the Taliban, has intensified since NATO troops withdrew at the end of last year.</s>The news comes in the wake of the Taliban’s reported capture of the hotly contested town of Sangin in Afghanistan on Thursday, the location of a number of U.S. and British fatalities inside the deadly Helmand Province.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi shared a statement on Thursday that claimed the Taliban had captured Sangin’s district center, according to the Associated Press.

But that claim has been refuted by coalition forces.

American Army Capt. William K. Salvin, spokesman for NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, pushed back, alleging that Afghan forces still controlled the town but had simply moved its district center.

“This move to a new district center had been planned for some time,” Salvin said, noting that U.S. Forces assisted with the move and helped destroy buildings and inoperable vehicles to leave nothing usable behind.

“The only thing they left to the Taliban is rubble and dirt,” he added.

The American military and NATO forces handed over control of Sangin to the Afghan military in 2013. Nineteen members of the American military have died maintaining the region since 2006, according to Operation Enduring Freedom statistics, and British forces lost more than a hundred soldiers in the town alone.

Russia, meanwhile, has largely been absent in the country since the Soviet Union fought a disastrous war there in the 1980s. But their renewed interest in the region, Scaparrotti said, seems to be growing.

Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month and told Senators that Russia was overtly attempting to legitimize the Taliban via a false narrative that they were fighting ISIS.

He added that he had received reports that Russia was also providing “support to the Taliban.”

The general called this “surprising” as “the Taliban have evolved over the years into a narco-insurgency and one that engages in extensive criminal activity, narcotics, kidnapping, illegal mining and other forms of criminal activity to fund their operations.”

Nicholson also noted that Russia had met with the Taliban in Moscow to discuss the future of Afghanistan, but hadn’t extended an invitation to the Afghan government.

Afghan and U.S. forces “are in a stalemate” and requested “a few thousand” more soldiers to help train, advise and assist the local military.</s>Sign up for one of our email newsletters.

“I've seen the influence of Russia of late, increased influence in terms of association and perhaps even supply to the Taliban,” Scaparrotti said.

Any type of material support, however, would be a significant escalation of Russia's involvement with the Taliban; it has said in the past that it maintains only limited communication with the group.

Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who is the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, did not elaborate to the Senate Armed Services Committee on what type of equipment the Taliban might have received or when.

The top American general in Europe told lawmakers Thursday that Russia and the Taliban are growing increasingly close, suggesting that the Kremlin might even be supplying the insurgent group.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban captured a key district center in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province on Thursday while in the country's north, an officer turned his rifle on sleeping colleagues, killing nine policemen, officials said.

The fall of Sangin district, once considered the deadliest battlefield for British and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, comes amid the insurgents' yearlong push to expand their footprint in the Taliban heartland of Helmand.

The British who took over southern Helmand in 2006 were headquartered at Camp Sebastian, which at its peak was the center for 137 bases in Helmand. Most of Britain's more than 400 military deaths occurred in Helmand province — in Sangin alone, Britain lost 104 soldiers.

Since the withdrawal of foreign NATO combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, and with only a smaller, U.S.-led advise and training mission left behind, Sangin has been seen as a major tests of whether Afghan security forces can hold off advancing Taliban fighters.

The district's police chief, Mohammad Rasoul, said the Taliban overran Sangin center early Thursday.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, also issued a statement claiming the Taliban capture of Sangin.

Speaking to The Associated Press over the phone from several miles away from the district center, Rasoul said the district headquarters had been poorly protected and that at the time of the Taliban siege, only eight policemen and 30 Afghan soldiers were on duty.

Afghan security forces were now amassing nearby for a full-scale counter-attack in a bid to retake Sangin, Rasoul added, though he did not say when the assault would occur and how many forces would be involved.

“We are preparing our reinforcements to recapture the district,” Rasoul said.

It wasn't immediately clear whether the Afghan military would seek the help of international coalition forces in the area.

NATO spokesman William Salvin said in a statement that Afghan troops remained in Sangin district but had relocated several kilometers (miles) outside the district center. He said the relocation was necessitated because of the extensive damage to the district center by the Taliban.

In Kabul, a lawmaker from Sangin, Mohammad Hashim Alokzai, urged the military to move quickly to retake the district, saying its fall could have devastating consequences for Helmand, where the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah has in the past months also come under constant and heavy attack by the Taliban.

“The seizure of Sangin is a major tactical triumph for the Taliban,” Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the U.S.-based Wilson Center, said Thursday. The insurgent group “has taken over a major urban space in one of its major stronghold provinces, amplifying the major threat that the group poses to Afghanistan nearly 16 years after it was removed from power.”

Sangin is also one of the biggest opium markets in Afghanistan, which saw over 4,800 metric tons produced countrywide in 2016 —— more than all other opium-producing countries combined, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes. Efforts at poppy eradication in Afghanistan have been severely restricted because of the insecurity in the southern and eastern regions of the country, where the bulk of the crop is grown.

Opium, which is used to make heroin, is a major source of income for the insurgents and the Taliban levy taxes on opium that moves through its territory.

“It's hard to overestimate the significance of Helmand — it's strategically located near Pakistan, it's a bastion of the opium trade,” said Kugelman. “Perhaps the biggest reason why the British focused so much on Sangin is that they had invested so much over the years in trying to stabilize the place — and had suffered many combat deaths in the process.”

In northern Kunduz province, police spokesman Mafuz Akbari said the insider attack on Thursday that claimed the lives on nine policemen took place at a security post and that the assailant escaped under the cover of darkness.

Afghanistan has seen a spike in so-called insider attacks. In such incidents, attackers who turn their rifles and kill colleagues usually end up stealing their weapons and fleeing the scene to join insurgents.

Akbari said the assailant had gone over to the Taliban. He also claimed that the attacker and the Taliban gathered the bodies of the dead policemen and set them on fire.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahed claimed responsibility for the attack, but denied that a policeman had been involved or that the Taliban had burned the bodies of the policemen.

The conflicting accounts could not be immediately reconciled. The region is remote and not accessible to reporters.

Afghan forces have come under intensified pressure by insurgents in both Helmand and Kunduz.</s>WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - The top U.S. general in Europe said on Thursday that he had seen Russian influence on Afghan Taliban insurgents growing and raised the possibility that Moscow was helping supply the militants, whose reach is expanding in southern Afghanistan.

"I've seen the influence of Russia of late - increased influence in terms of association and perhaps even supply to the Taliban," Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, who is also NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

He did not elaborate on what kinds of supplies might be headed to the Taliban or how direct Russia's role might be.

Moscow has been critical of the United States over its handling of the war in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union fought a bloody and disastrous war of its own in the 1980s.

But Russian officials have denied they provide aid to the insurgents, who are contesting large swaths of territory and inflicting heavy casualties, and say their limited contacts are aimed at bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table.

According to U.S. estimates, government forces control less than 60 percent of Afghanistan, with almost half the country either contested or under control of the insurgents, who are seeking to reimpose Islamic law after their 2001 ouster.

Underlying the insurgents' growing strength, Taliban fighters have captured the strategic district of Sangin in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, officials said on Thursday.

The top U.S. commander in the country, General John Nicholson, said last month that Afghanistan was in a "stalemate" and that thousands more international troops would be needed to boost the existing NATO-led training and advisory mission.

Scaparrotti said the stakes were high. More than 1,800 American troops have been killed in fighting since the war began in 2001.

"NATO and the United States, in my view, must win in Afghanistan," he said.

Taliban officials have told Reuters that the group has had significant contacts with Moscow since at least 2007, adding that Russian involvement did not extend beyond "moral and political support." (Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Russian Special Envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov denies allegations by NATO Commander Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti that Russia was "perhaps" supplying the Taliban.