KABUL, 27 June 2005 — A senior Taleban commander yesterday dismissed as false Afghan government reports that 178 guerrillas were killed in a US-backed offensive in southwestern Afghanistan last week. Mulla Dadullah, one of two top Taleban commanders the government said had been surrounded in the fighting, telephoned Reuters to say that only seven or eight guerrillas had been killed, including one commander, Mulla Mohammad Easa.
Speaking by satellite phone from an undisclosed location, Dadullah said the guerrillas had killed about 20 Afghan police and army troops and 14-18 from the US-backed foreign force hunting militants in Afghanistan. “The government was claiming that it killed 178 Taleban,” he said. “That is not true.”
“The government was claiming that it had surrounded Mulla Dadullah, Mulla Brother, Mulla Adbul Hanan, Mulla Abdul Basir and Mulla Abdul Hakim and that they would soon arrest or kill them,” he said. “This was completely wrong.”
A truckload of munitions exploded in northern Afghanistan at the weekend, killing five Afghan civilians and two German soldiers from the NATO-led peacekeeping force, officials said yesterday. Fifteen Afghan civilians and a German peacekeeper were hurt in the blast, near an airfield in Takhar province on Saturday afternoon as the munitions were being loaded on to a truck for disposal, Takhar Governor Ghulam Ghaws Abubakar told Reuters.
Meanwhile, the government rejected yesterday charges by Russia that Moscow’s Central Asian allies are being targeted by Islamic militants trained in Afghanistan. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that “terrorist bases” run by Taleban were still operational.
Speaking after talks with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Lavrov said radicals from ex-Soviet Uzbekistan and Russia were involved in training guerrillas at bases located in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan. In a statement, Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry said it had noted Lavrov’s remarks with “deep regret”. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan strongly rejects claims regarding the presence of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and considers such allegations as totally baseless,” it said.
In another development, Afghanistan said it has mounted a serious campaign to tackle its booming narcotics trade and punish traffickers in the wake of a United Nations warning that narco-traffic is undermining the country’s security. Officials torched almost 60 tons of opium, heroin and hashish across the country , Gen. Mohammad Daud, deputy minister for counternarcotics, told reporters.
