The suicide attacks that have struck Afghanistan in the past months are clearly the work of al-Qaeda and the Taliban fighters operating with foreign support, the Afghan foreign minister said on Thursday.
Abdullah Abdullah rejected a statement from a purported spokesman of the Taliban regime ousted in 2001 that the group was not behind a suicide blast on Monday that killed 22 people, the highest toll in a spate of such attacks.
"The fact that the Taliban denied carrying out the attack in Spin Boldak shouldn't be taken into account," Abdullah said in an interview with AFP. "Who else could do that? Only Taliban and al-Qaeda," he said.
"Security incidents come from al-Qaeda or Taliban. They get some support from outside Afghanistan, people crossing the border from Pakistan," he said.
"The suicide bombers are mostly foreigners," he said, declining to say where they might be from.
There have been about 20 suicide blasts in Afghanistan in the past four months. The attackers are widely believed to cross into the country from bases in the largely lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.
Monday's attack on a crowd leaving a wrestling match in Spin Boldak near the Pakistani border was the deadliest of the attacks.
The Taliban spokesman denied responsibility, saying the group did not target civilians.
He said however the group was behind another suicide bombing in insurgency-hit Kandahar Province on Monday which killed four people and one on Sunday that killed the most senior Canadian envoy in Afghanistan and two Afghans.
Analysts said the attacks could be intended as a warning to NATO troops due to deploy in the coming months into troubled southern Afghanistan, where a US-led coalition of around 20,000 troops has been based for about four years to hunt down militants.
Abdullah said the situation in the south was not likely to change and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) should have the same counter-insurgency capacity as the coalition.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done