Tag Archives: Taliban insurgents

U.S. focused on securing Kabul airport after chaos

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will focus on securing the Kabul airport and additional U.S. forces will flow into the airport on Monday and Tuesday, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer said, as people tried to flee a day after Taliban insurgents seized the Afghan capital.

The United States has temporarily halted all evacuation flights from Kabul to clear people who had converged on the airfield, a U.S. defense official told Reuters, but did not say how long the pause would last.

The defense official said the United States intent was to get tens of thousands of at-risk Afghans who worked for the U.S. government out of Afghanistan and was looking at temporarily housing them at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin and Fort Bliss in Texas.

Five people were killed in chaos at Kabul airport on Monday, witnesses said, as people tried to flee after Taliban insurgents seized Kabul and declared the war against foreign and local forces over.

U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer said that the U.S. was focused intensively on securing the Kabul airport on Monday in order to continue civilian evacuation flights for American citizens in Afghanistan, Afghans who worked alongside the U.S. over the past 20 years and for other particularly vulnerable Afghans.

“The main focus of our efforts today are going to be getting that airport back up and running so the flights can continue,” Finer told MSNBC.

Additional U.S. forces will be flowing into the airport on Monday and Tuesday to provide security, he added.

Taliban insurgents took control of the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday following a rout of the U.S.-backed Afghan army as foreign forces withdrew from Afghanistan.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali, Daphne Psaledakis, Lisa Lambert and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Giles Elgood and Nick Zieminski)

Afghan commander Ismail Khan captured as Taliban seize Herat

KABUL (Reuters) – Taliban insurgents have seized most of Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city, and also captured Ismail Khan, the veteran local commander leading militia resistance there, local officials said on Friday.

The fall of Herat, the latest in a series of major provincial cities to be taken by the Taliban in the past few days, has dealt a shocking blow to the government of President Ashraf Ghani only weeks after the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

One official said Afghan government forces had agreed to withdraw from Herat airport, 15 km (nine miles) from the city, and the Army Corps commander’s headquarters, the last centers under their control. However other sources said Afghan forces were still at the airport as of 1 p.m. local time (0830 GMT).

“The Taliban agreed that they will not pose any threat or harm to the government officials who surrendered,” said provincial council member Ghulam Habib Hashimi.

As fighting subsided, the streets fell silent in Herat, a major economic hub of about 600,000 people close to the border with Iran and over centuries one of the historic centers of Persian culture.

“Families have either left or are hiding in their houses,” said Hashimi, who described Herat as a “ghost town”.

Herat has seen increasingly heavy fighting with popular militia groups serving alongside regular army units as Taliban pressure on the city mounted following the U.S. pullout.

Khan, the most prominent militia commander and believed to be in his 70s, together with the provincial governor and security officials, were handed over to the Taliban under an agreement, Hashimi told Reuters. He had no details of the deal.

Khan’s capture, confirmed by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, provided one of the most potent symbols of the crumbling of resistance in the city.

Photos and videos showing the eminent commander apparently in the hands of the insurgents were widely shared on social media although they could not immediately be verified.

Ismail Khan is widely known as the Lion of Herat. His involvement in Afghanistan’s wars goes back to the anti-government uprising that helped trigger the 1979 Soviet intervention, and his return to the front lines a month ago was a clear sign of the growing threat to Herat.

(Reporting by Kabul staff, writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, editing by Mark Heinrich)

In symbolic end to war, U.S. general steps down from Afghanistan command

By Phil Stewart

KABUL (Reuters) -The U.S. general leading the war in Afghanistan, Austin Miller, relinquished command on Monday at a ceremony in Kabul, in what was a symbolic end to America’s longest conflict even as Taliban insurgents gain momentum across the country.

Miller, America’s last four-star commander to serve on the ground in Afghanistan, stepped down ahead of a formal end to the U.S. military mission there on Aug. 31, a date set by President Joe Biden as he looks to extricate the country from the two-decade-old war.

Addressing a small gathering outside his military headquarters in Kabul, Miller vowed to remember the lives lost in the fighting and called on the Taliban to halt a wave of violent attacks that have given them control of more territory than at any time since the conflict began.

“What I tell the Taliban is they’re responsible too. The violence that’s going on is against the will of the Afghan people, and it needs to stop,” Miller said. While the ceremony may offer some sense of closure for U.S. veterans who served in Afghanistan, it’s unclear whether it will succeed in reassuring the Western-backed Afghan government as the Taliban press ground offensives.

U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, whose Florida-based Central Command oversees U.S. forces in hot-spots including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, flew into Kabul to underscore America’s future assistance to Afghan security forces.

“You can count on our support in the dangerous and difficult days ahead. We will be with you,” McKenzie said in his address.

Speaking separately to a small group of reporters, McKenzie cautioned that the Taliban, in his view, were seeking “a military solution” to a war that the United States has unsuccessfully tried to end with a peace agreement between the Taliban and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government.

He said provincial capitals were at risk but noted that the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces “are determined to fight very hard for those provincial capitals.”

McKenzie will be able to authorize U.S. air strikes against the Taliban through Aug. 31 in support of Ghani’s Western-backed government.

But after that, the Marine general said when it came to U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, his focus will shift squarely to counter-terrorism operations against al Qaeda and Islamic State.

INTELLIGENCE NETWORK

Gathering enough intelligence on the ground to prevent another Sept. 11-style attack could become increasingly challenging, as America’s intelligence network weakens with the U.S. withdrawal and as Afghan troops lose territory.

U.S. Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat and former senior Pentagon official, said many lawmakers were still looking for answers from the Biden administration about how the U.S. will be able to detect a future al Qaeda plot against the United States.

“I don’t need them to tell the entire world what our day-after plan is. But I think it’s important that they let us know some of the details on a private basis,” Slotkin said.

U.S. officials do not believe the Taliban could be relied upon to prevent al Qaeda from again plotting attacks against the United States from Afghan soil.

The United Nations said in a report in January there were as many as 500 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and that the Taliban maintained a close relationship with the Islamist extremist group.

LONGEST-SERVING GENERAL

As he steps down, Miller, 60, has spent longer on the ground than any of the previous generals to command the war.

He had a close call in 2018 when a rogue Afghan bodyguard in Kandahar province opened fire and killed a powerful Afghan police chief standing near Miller. A U.S. brigadier general was wounded, as were other Americans, but Miller emerged unscathed.

After Miller leaves the post, the Pentagon has engineered a transition that will allow a series of generals to carry on with supporting Afghan security forces, mostly from overseas.

Beyond McKenzie’s over watch from Florida, a Qatar-based brigadier general, Curtis Buzzard, will focus on administering funding support for the Afghan security forces – including aircraft maintenance support.

In Kabul, Navy Rear Admiral Peter Vasely will lead a newly created U.S. Forces Afghanistan-Forward, focusing on protecting the U.S. embassy and the airport.

Vasely, as a two-star admiral, is higher ranked than usual for a U.S. embassy-based post. But a U.S. defense official added that Afghanistan was a “very unique situation.”

“There’s no comparable diplomatic security situation in the world with what we’re going to establish,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Still, what happens next in Afghanistan appears to be increasingly out of America’s control.

Biden acknowledged on Thursday that Afghanistan’s future was far from certain but said the Afghan people must decide their own fate.

“I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome,” he said.

About 2,400 U.S. service members have been killed in America’s longest war – and many thousands wounded.

(Reporting by Phil StewartEditing by Robert Birsel and Paul Simao)

Suicide bomber in Pakistan’s Lahore kills 25, many of them police

Rescue workers and policemen gather after a suicide blast in Lahore, Pakistan July 24, 2017.

By Mubasher Bukhari

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed at least 25 people, many of them police, in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Monday, officials said, an attack which shattered a period of relative calm in Pakistan’s second-largest city.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack which wrought carnage near the Lahore Technology Park in the center of the city. Police deployed to clear street vendors from the area had been targeted, a police official said.

“We suspect that he (the suicide bomber) came on a motorcycle and he rammed it into a police checkpoint,” Lahore police operations chief Haider Ashraf told Reuters.

Rescue workers shifted the wounded to hospital and police officers cordoned off the bomb site as army troops also arrived at the scene.

“The death toll we have now is 25 dead and 52 are wounded,” said Jam Sajjad Hussain, spokesman for the Rescue 1122 service.

A wounded man sitting on the roadside was shown crying in pain on television amidst cars and motorcycles mangled by the blast.

The bombing was claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, in a message sent to the media by spokesman Muhammad Khurassani. The Pakistani Taliban are loosely allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents but focus their attacks on the Pakistani government.

Bomb blasts by militants are common in Pakistan, especially in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, but attacks in Lahore have become less frequent in recent years.

Haider Ashraf, deputy inspector general of Punjab police, said the blast was a suicide attack and “police were the target”.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said the majority of those killed and wounded were police and warned the death toll could rise.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the blast in a statement and directed medical efforts for those injured.

In early April, a suicide attack on an army census team that killed at least six people and wounded 18 in Lahore was also claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.

After a series of attacks in February, including two in Lahore that killed over 20 people, Pakistan’s powerful military began a nationwide crackdown on militants.

 

(Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Nick Macfie and Richard Balmforth)