Georgia’s forces have sometimes seemed to lack the caution of other nations’ troops in Afghanistan. In an e-mail this spring inviting reporters to be embedded with Georgian troops, a Georgian press officer described the area where they operate in Helmand as “the triangle of violence” but offered to take reporters “on foot patrols in Afghan villages and to meet locals.”

The offer struck many as dangerous because the area is among the most hostile in the country to foreign soldiers and is heavily influenced by the Taliban. The Georgians have bitter experience with this.

A Georgian soldier disappeared in December in Musa Qala and was found dead nearly two weeks later with signs of having been beaten and tortured by the Taliban.

He was the only ISAF service member known to have been captured since 2011, when a British soldier was captured and executed by the Taliban. The only other soldier known to have been captured is Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American, who has been missing since 2009 and is believed to be held by the Haqqani network.

The Georgians have focused on keeping the Taliban from setting up checkpoints on the main roads that connect Musa Qala, Now Zad and Sangin with the provincial capital and with one another. But that has not won them points with residents.

According to some local Afghan elders, the Georgian troops are not particularly well liked in the area, where previously the British and in some places the Americans had been assigned. Language may be the root of the problem, not only because residents became familiar with English-speaking British and American troops in the 10 years they were in the area, but also because Afghans often think of the Georgians as synonymous with Russians, who are still viewed as enemies dating from the Soviet Union’s occupation of the country.

“They don’t know English and speak a Russian-sounding kind of language,” said Abdul Rahman Mutmain, an elder from Landy-Nawa, a village where the Georgians have one of their bases.