The violence in Sangin did not begin with the British. The town of 30,000 sat in Helmand's fertile "green zone," where irrigated farmland made it one of Afghanistan's most productive opium poppy regions. Control of Sangin meant control of the smuggling corridor running south to Maiwand and across the Pakistani border. Two competing Pashtun tribes -- the Alikozai, who held the district governorship, and the Ishakzai, who sympathized with the Taliban -- had long made the town a fault line. When the Taliban seized Sangin in mid-June 2006, they targeted the Alikozai district governor's family with particular brutality, killing 33 members including his brother who had previously held the same office. One resident recalled the chaos: the district office seized, the governor forced to flee, and then "general fighting and bombings."

On June 13, 2006, after a U.S. convoy was ambushed on the road north to Musa Qala, 120 British troops arrived in two Chinook helicopters. The Taliban initially offered no resistance, and local residents seemed passively accepting of the new presence. The soldiers garrisoned the governor's compound -- the district centre -- half a mile from the town center, reinforcing its mud walls with sandbags and digging foxholes around the perimeter. For a few days, British patrols moved through the streets without incident. Then, on June 27, a failed Special Reconnaissance Regiment raid killed two soldiers near Sangin. Local elders arrived at the compound and demanded the British leave. The atmosphere shifted overnight. Small arms fire hit the base, and the siege began.

Taliban fighters used the bazaar's narrow alleys as staging areas, emerging at night to fire RPG-7 rockets and small arms at the compound. With every road severed, the garrison depended entirely on helicopter flights from Camp Bastion for food, ammunition, and medical evacuation -- resupply that was sometimes interrupted for five consecutive days when Taliban fire made landings too dangerous. Royal Engineers built a double wall of Hesco barriers around the compound and helicopter pad, working under fire. On July 1, a Chinese-made 107mm rocket struck the district centre and killed Corporal Peter Thorpe, Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi -- the first British Muslim soldier to die in the war on terror -- and an Afghan interpreter. They had been intercepting Taliban radio communications when the rocket hit. The situation worsened further when Afghan policemen inside the base began defecting to the Taliban, carrying with them detailed knowledge of the compound's layout.

On August 20, a 20-man group of paratroopers was clearing a compound when the Taliban sprung an ambush. Corporal Bryan Budd led his section in an immediate counterattack, personally killing two fighters before heavy fire forced a withdrawal. Two of his men were wounded. It was only afterward that the platoon commander realized Budd was missing. Rescuing him was impossible under the ongoing barrage. Major Jamie Loden scraped together a relief force from whatever was available -- Royal Engineers, two Royal Military Policemen who happened to be in Sangin, elements of other units. With Apache helicopter gunships providing covering fire, they reached Budd an hour after he had been hit. It was too late. For his actions that day, Budd was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest distinction in the British armed forces.

The paratroopers were eventually replaced by 3 Commando Brigade -- first Kilo Company of 42 Commando Royal Marines, then rotations of light infantry and fusiliers. The violence did not relent. Fire Support Teams from the 29th Commando Regiment Royal Artillery lost three killed in less than a week during one particularly savage stretch. When C Company of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers arrived in March 2007, they were attacked 79 times in their first twenty days. The siege finally ended on April 5, 2007, when coalition forces occupied the town and found it largely abandoned -- vacated by most of its inhabitants and by the Taliban, who had melted away rather than face the massed assault. The ruins of the district centre, cratered and scarred, stood as evidence of what ten months of continuous urban combat had cost both sides.