Sky News has gained unprecedented access to the heart of the Taliban and seen first-hand how they make and plant the roadside bombs which have killed or injured dozens of British troops.

They call themselves Commandos. A Taliban team whose lethal improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are a constant danger to UK and American forces in Afghanistan.

We met at night in a village high in the mountains of Kunar province that borders Pakistan. It is a lawless place where the Taliban have massed and has taken over from Helmand as their main operational centre.

Inside The Taliban

It has taken seven months of negotiation to meet them and they insist they have never met any journalists - and certainly not British journalists - before. They consider us as much the enemy as any soldier.

We had asked them to show us how they make and plant their IEDs, which have so characterised their insurgency in recent years.

Our own condition of filming was that all dangerous material was dismantled and removed when it was done - and it was.

We were to be the first people to ever see one of their teams in action.

I was led in pitch darkness through cornfields and along a river until we reached a culvert; a small bridge that crosses irrigation ditches.

We watched as a small trench was dug in the ground while two other men filled a canister with a white substance followed by rocks.

They attached a wire then buried the canister in a hole dug to the side of the culvert.

Another of the Taliban then began playing out the wire and headed into a cornfield.

The trench was then covered over.

They were laying a command wire. It is how they explode the bomb from far away. It is a simple electrical charge but deadly efficient.

The commander told me the wire would be taken about two kilometres away and attached to a battery pack with a simple switch mechanism.

I asked if they worried they would be seen from the sky by helicopters with night sights.

"Yes, but we work quickly," the commander told me.

Within minutes they were finished. There was no sign that anything had been disturbed.

"We wait and see how often Isaf forces use the road. If it is once a day we lay a bomb, if it is twice a day we lay two, if it is five we will lay five. Our success rate is 100%," he said.

That is not true, but they have been effective.

The fighters fear being seen by the helicopters flying overhead

The command wire bomb is hard to detect and the devices the army use to stop remote radio controlled bombs will not stop this explosion.

The Taliban said they place a soldier further up the road and another on a hill overlooking the place where the IED is planted. Using radios they co-ordinate their attack.

As we filmed they looked nervously into the sky as a helicopter could be heard in the distance. Within minutes they had melted into the dark until the noise of the rotor blades could no longer be heard.

They returned and removed their IED - the condition set by Sky before filming - and led us to the point where we had met.

They told us never to return.

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