Taliban fighters took control of a remote district near the Pakistani border on Saturday, scattering the forces of the Afghan government, who said they had run out of ammunition.
A force of Taliban attackers entered the district of Barg-e-Matal at about 8am on Saturday, after the local police retreated, Deputy Police Chief Colonel Sherzad said in an interview.
“Our forces retreated because they did not have enough ammunition,” he said, echoing other officials in the area. Only 24 hours before, Afghan officials had claimed that they had driven the Taliban from the district into neighboring Pakistan.
The fall of Barg-e-Matal, while embarrassing to the Afghan government, is not necessarily strategically significant. The district sits on an isolated valley in Nuristan Province, one of the most inaccessible places in the country.
The US, which provided limited air support over the past few days in clashes with the Taliban, provided none on Saturday.
General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, has emphasized protecting population centers, even at the expense of writing off smaller inaccessible areas.
Barg-e-Matal would seem to qualify. Last year, a group of US soldiers spent two months in the valley to help the Afghan government clear and hold the area and pulled out in September.
Last month, the Americans closed their outposts in the nearby Korengal Valley, an equally remote place, after four years of trying to pacify local Afghans. Local Taliban quickly moved in.
Afghan officials said the Taliban fighters in Barg-e-Matal were Pakistanis, other foreigners and members of al-Qaeda, although they offered no evidence to support that assertion.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS