Soldier Killed in Afghanistan is Named

A British soldier killed in southern Afghanistan's strife-torn Helmand province yesterday has been named as Private Andrew Cutts of the Colchester-based Royal Logistics Corps.

Pte Cutts' died yesterday while his 13 Air Assault Support Regiment was resupplying a coalition base at Musa Qala north of Helmand. A military spokesman said that Taliban fighters had been killed in the incident, although there was no word of how many.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, only two British soldiers had died as a result of hostile action. Yet in the past two months, 10 British troops have been killed in the province.

The news came as the UN's envoy in Afghanistan warned that military campaigns against Taliban fighters in the country would not be sufficient to defeat the growing insurgency.

"There is a virtual unlimited reservoir of Taliban fighters. It is not possible to defeat the movement by inflicting heavy losses on it," UN assistance mission head Tom Koenigs told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine.

The British-led international security assistance force took over leadership of military operations in southern Afghanistan from the Americans last week, with 8,000 troops in the region.

Officials said that they hoped the situation would improve before next spring, but were "not promising Switzerland within six months".

Fighting between the two sides has been bloody. Isaf claimed last week that 400 Taliban had been killed and 700 injured or captured during the six-week Operation Mountain Thrust - a campaign to crack down on Taliban militants in the run-up to the handover of power.

But militants have continued to stage serious attacks on coalition troops. Three British soldiers were killed in a Taliban attack near Musa Qala on Tuesday, and on Thursday a Canadian soldier was killed by a roadside bomb on the main highway linking Helmand with the southern Afghan capital Kandahar.

A suicide bombing in a market place in Kandahar province killed 21 people on Thursday, and Isaf claimed that a firefight in the Nahr Surkh area of Helmand on the same day killed 25 Taliban militants.

One senior officer in the region was yesterday quoted as saying that British troops are now at the ends of their tethers. "The men are knackered - they are on the brink of exhaustion," the unnamed officer told the Sunday Telegraph. "They are under considerable duress and have suffered great hardship."