Afghanistan: US to continue strikes if Taliban offensive continues

Published on : 07/25/2021 – 9:21 PM

The United States will continue their air strikes against the Taliban, if they continue the offensive they have been leading since early May in Afghanistan, warned Sunday, July 25 in Kabul, the head of US military operations in this country.

“The United States has stepped up its airstrikes in support of Afghan forces in recent days and we stand ready to continue this high level of support in the days to come if the Taliban continue their attacks,” Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said, boss of the US Army Central Command (Centcom).

The Taliban have seized large parts of rural Afghanistan for almost three months, in an all-out offensive against Afghan forces, coinciding with the start of the final withdrawal of international forces from the country, now almost complete.

The Afghan forces have so far offered little resistance and essentially control only the provincial capitals and the main roads.

“The government of Afghanistan will be put to the test in the days to come, the Taliban are trying to make their campaign inevitable. They are wrong (…) The victory of the Taliban is not inevitable,” he said. General McKenzie.

“We will continue to support the Afghan forces, even after August 31”, the announced deadline for the end of the withdrawal of American forces, “it will generally be done from outside the country. And it will be a significant change”, he continued.

General McKenzie also announced that after this date, the United States “would continue to provide important logistical support, in particular to the Afghan air force”, in Afghanistan or on Centcom bases.

“Political solution”

As head of Centcom, which oversees U.S. military activities in 20 countries in the Middle East and Central and South Asia, General McKenzie has led military operations in Afghanistan since the end of the command of U.S. forces in the country, Gen. Austin Scott Miller, July 12.

The recent lightning advance of the Taliban raises fears that they will seize power again, almost exactly twenty years after being ousted from it at the end of 2001 by an international coalition led by the United States, after their refusal to hand over the leader. ‘Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The United States signed in February 2020 in Doha a historic agreement with the Taliban providing for the withdrawal of all foreign soldiers from Afghanistan in exchange for an end to attacks on international troops and the opening of direct negotiations between insurgents and authorities. from Kabul.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid had denounced Friday “barbaric” aerial bombardments carried out by the “American occupation forces”. He described these strikes as “a clear violation of the agreement signed (in Doha) which will have consequences”.

Begun last September in Qatar, the inter-Afghan talks have seen no progress, the two camps accusing each other of not wanting peace.

General McKenzie, however, felt that “there is a path that can lead to a political solution to this war”.

Curfew

In recent weeks, the Taliban have approached Kandahar, the large city in the south, the cradle of their movement, whose suburbs are the scene of fighting.

With more than 650,000 inhabitants, Kandahar is the second largest city in the country behind Kabul. The Taliban had made it the center of their regime, based on an ultrarigorist interpretation of Islam, which ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

Some 22,000 families have, in the past month, “fled unstable districts in the suburbs” west, north and south of Kandahar, “to safer areas” in the city center, director Dost Mohammad Daryab told AFP on Sunday. Provincial Refugee Service.

These 22,000 families represent about 150,000 people, the National Bureau of Statistics estimates that in Afghanistan a family consists of an average of seven people.

Kandahar provincial vice-governor Lalai Dastageeri told AFP on Sunday that “fighting continues in the southern, northern and western suburbs of Kandahar.”

After a relative lull on the ground during the three days of Eid el Adha, the Muslim feast of the Sacrifice, the Afghan authorities announced that they had launched multiple military operations since Friday in about fifteen provinces, in an attempt to regain ground.

They decreed on Saturday a night curfew on the entire territory with the exception of three provinces, including that of Kabul.

With AFP