Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has used the holiest Muslim holiday of the year to warn that his men will intensify their fighting in Afghanistan to "surprising" levels to drive out foreign forces.
In a message to Afghans for Id al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, Omar also urged NATO to withdraw its almost 20,000 troops and stop sacrificing soldiers for the US, adding the nation stood with him.
"With the grace of Allah, the fighting will be increased ... and it will be organized in the next few months," he said in a message to media also posted on the Internet and signed "Leader of the Faithful in the Afghan Resistance."
"I am confident the fighting will be a surprise for many," he said.
NATO, which took over full national command of the war against the Taliban from US forces this month, says attacks in the south have fallen since it killed hundreds of insurgents in a two-week offensive last month named Operation Medusa.
But fighting and bombings are virtually daily events and the government has warned of a rise in suicide bombings ahead of the traditional winter lull in combat.
Omar said Afghan President Hamid Karzai would face Islamic justice for cooperating with Washington.
"The Kabul puppet regime has failed to establish peace and stability as well as to control narcotics," he said, adding members of the government were involved in the opium trade.
Officials and analysts say the Taliban is partly funded by drug lords underwriting fighting and insecurity to keep the police and the law from their poppy fields and smuggling routes.
Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin, and its crop is expected to jump about 60 percent this year.
Talking to reporters after Id prayers at the presidential palace, Karzai did not comment on Omar's message, but called on Afghans not to be swayed by the Taliban.
"My message to those who are being used by strangers and killing their people and their children, destroying their homes, my message is to free themselves from the grip of menace," he said.
"That menace has been destroying Afghanistan for years. I ask them to come to their country and free themselves from being used by others and work to build their country not to destroy it," Karzai said.
Meanwhile NATO-led troops and Afghan soldiers patrolled an area of western Afghanistan yesterday where factional fighting left at least 32 people dead, including a notorious warlord.
Karzai said he would send a delegation to the remote area in the western province of Herat, to "try to bring peace and calm" after Sunday's clashes.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema