KABUL: The Afghan government has doubled the number of Afghanistan’s most skilled fighting force — an elite group whose growing strength worries the Taliban, according to the military officials.

These new members of Afghanistan’s Special Operations Command (SOC) will soon be on the frontline of the war that US President Donald Trump has vowed “to win” by putting more American boots on the ground indefinitely.

Camp Morehead, a former Soviet base near Kabul, is one of two training bases where the commandos are drilled by Afghan instructors in a programme overseen by US-led international forces.

“We are hunters, you know. What I’m saying to you is we are killers, we are looking for the bad people,” one of the commandos, who cannot be identified, told reporters recently at the secondary training base.

While the SOC — which also includes top special forces — account for about seven percent of the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces, they have been deployed in nearly 80 percent of offensives and emerged victorious each time, they say — a claim supported by US and foreign forces.

Earlier this year Afghan President Ashraf Ghani ordered a near doubling of their ranks from 17,000 as part of a four-year road-map that also aims to strengthen Afghanistan’s air force.