KABUL — An American soldier was killed by a bomb near the southern Afghan city of Lashkar Gah, officials said Tuesday, days after more than 100 US soldiers arrived there to help plan the strategic city’s defense against a fierce Taliban assault.
The US military has increasingly found itself drawn back to regular combat situations this year as the Afghan forces have struggled against Taliban offensives.
The increased US presence around Lashkar Gah in particular, more than two years after British soldiers closed their last base in the city, highlights a scramble to prevent the fall of a major population center.
For weeks before the Americans’ arrival, top Afghan generals were being sent from Kabul to hold the line as district after district came under attack, with the Taliban surrounding the city.
In a statement on Tuesday, the US military said the service member had died of “wounds sustained during operations near Lashkar Gah,’’ the capital of Helmand province, when a joint patrol encountered an improvised explosive device.
The soldier was not immediately identified. Six Afghan soldiers and another US soldier were wounded in the blast.
It was the second death of a US soldier in hostile fire in Afghanistan this year, as the force here has mostly been reduced to a smaller advisory mission. In January, Staff Sergeant Matthew Q. McClintock was killed in Marjah district, also in Helmand province.
Even as local Afghan officials were reporting the presence of US personnel near the battlefield in the Chah-e-Anjir area, about 10 miles from Lashkar Gah, US military officials in Kabul insisted that the new team was there only to advise the leadership of the southern police zone based out of the city.
“The troops that have gone down there are really focused on force protection of the advisers there, to make sure they are secure,’’ Brigadier General Charles E. Cleveland, a spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan, told reporters on Monday. “What you won’t see is — they are not about to go out and conduct operations.’’
On Tuesday, Cleveland said, “The service members killed and wounded today were not a part of the new advisory mission in Lashkar Gah,’’ suggesting that they were part of the regular advisory support the NATO mission has been providing Afghan special operation forces, often traveling with them in their raids.
Still, the line between combat and advising has become remarkably thin as Afghan special forces, trained to conduct quick commando raids, have for weeks now been used as ground forces outside Lashkar Gah.
Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand, said that joint operations by NATO forces — mostly Americans — and Afghan forces were continuing in the Chah-e-Anjir and Babajii neighborhoods outside Lashkar Gah, with the Westerners providing air and ground support.
“NATO troops are now on the ground fighting with Afghan forces against the Taliban,’’ he said.
As the top generals were busy in Helmand, the northern city of Kunduz, which was briefly overrun by the Taliban last fall, once again faced strong offensives at its gates. The district of Khanabad briefly fell to the insurgents, and fighting raged less than a mile from the city center.
Residents of Kunduz city could hear constant airstrikes into the early hours of Tuesday, with bombings focused on trying to push back the Taliban from Zar Khared, an area less than 2 miles from the city center.
A small group of US advisers is based at the airport in Kunduz, but local officials said Tuesday that they had not left the outpost to join operations.
It was a small advisory team of US Special Forces troops that led a desperate effort to retake that city from the Taliban last fall. That US force also called in the botched airstrike that destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the city, killing 42 people.
Most of the roads leading to Kunduz province remained blocked on Tuesday and, despite continuous airstrikes, ground operations for recapturing the lost territories had not yet started, Afghan officials said.
US military officials say they will not allow another Afghan city to fall, not just because of its symbolic implications to the 15 years of NATO presence here, but also because of the politically destabilizing effects it could have on the struggling government in Kabul.
As Taliban gains in Helmand continued, a US military battalion was sent to the province this year to bolster the Afghan army corps taking heavy casualties in the fighting. That was the largest deployment of US troops outside major bases in Afghanistan since the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014.
In June, President Obama loosened combat restrictions in Afghanistan for the US military, which remains mostly focused on missions to train and advise Afghan forces and to conduct counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates.
Under the new rules, the number of airstrikes, which Afghan forces often credit with slowing Taliban advances, have increased significantly.
