US forces on Thursday were frantically hunting for a soldier believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the first to be taken since the US began operations in the country in 2001.
The soldier, whose unit is based in eastern Paktika Province, was not involved in the ongoing operation in the south of the country. He was found to be missing during a roster check on Tuesday morning and is believed to be held by a Taliban faction linked to a string of attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We understand him to have been captured by militant forces. We have all available resources out there looking for him and hopefully providing for his safe return,” Captain Elizabeth Mathias, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said on Thursday. “We are not providing further details to protect the soldier’s well-being.”
But Afghan police General Nabi Mullakheil disclosed the location of the kidnap as Mullakheil area in Paktika, where there is a US base. The Pentagon has requested the help of Pakistani forces to seal the border. Pakistani officials have also asked villagers along the border to provide information if the soldier’s captors pass through their area or ask for help. It is highly unusual for the US military to disclose that one of its soldiers has been kidnapped, especially when operations are still under way to try to get him back.
Unconfirmed reports said the soldier had been based at a small combat outpost and had apparently gone with three Afghan soldiers into a dangerous area. The soldier’s family has been informed of his disappearance.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujaheed, said he had no information about the soldier being held. But another Taliban spokesman said he was being held by an insurgent faction linked to Sirajuddin Haqqani, a powerful figure based in Pakistan who controls large parts of Afghanistan along the border.
Haqqani has been blamed for a string of attacks including the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul last year, which killed more than 50 people.
Military commanders are desperate to prevent the soldier’s captors taking him across the border into Pakistan, where al-Qaeda is still a presence in the border areas and in cities such as Peshawar.
The kidnapping could provide the Taliban with a major media coup: While individual fatalities from Afghanistan or Iraq have become almost routine and are largely ignored by the US media, the fate of a single soldier in Taliban hands could attract enormous attention.
Previous high-profile kidnappings in Iraq, in which videos of abductees were posted on the Internet, have had a big emotional impact on the US public. Those victims were mostly civilians and contractors, while those soldiers taken in Iraq were usually killed soon afterward.
Previous kidnappings have had a huge resonance in the US. One of the reasons for the still poor relationship between the US and Iran is the embassy hostage siege in Tehran after the 1979 revolution, when Americans across the country tied yellow ribbons to trees as a symbol of solidarity.
Judith Kipper, director of the Middle East program at the Institute of World Affairs, said she thought the US cared especially about hostages.
“The Iranian hostage siege was hideous but it was not a matter of national security, and look how revved up we got about that,” Kipper said.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of