US-led forces have finished major combat operations in Afghanistan's Marjah region and believe most Taliban fighters are either dead or have blended into the population, a senior officer said Friday, AFP reported.
Brigadier General Ben Hodges, who heads operations in southern Afghanistan, said on US public television that US, British and Afghan forces would still need "a few weeks" to control remote villages in the southern area.
"There will be some sporadic fighting, I believe, some tough areas where there are still a few holdouts. I think most of the significant combat operations, though, will have subsided," Hodges told the PBS Newshour.
"I think the majority of the enemy has either been killed or driven out or blended back into the population," he said in a televised interview from Kandahar, Afghanistan's second city.
Hodges said that senior Taliban had already fled the area as soon as US, NATO and Afghan forces launched the offensive in the poppy-growing region on February 13.
Dubbed Operation Mushtarak, or "Together," the offensive is billed as the biggest such assault on a Taliban stronghold since US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks.
A senior US official earlier said that the offensive was only a preview of a larger operation to come to secure control over Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.
The assaults are part of President Barack Obama's strategy to pour thousands more troops into Afghanistan to wrest control from the Taliban, but in hopes of handing over control to local authorities starting in mid-2011.
Most combat over in Afghan offensive: US officer
