LONDON, 24 October 2006 — Afghan militants are planning to launch deadly attacks on civilians in Europe in revenge for the 2001 invasion by US-led forces, a Taleban commander said on Sky News television yesterday.
Mullah Mohammed Amin said resurgent militants had built up stockpiles of weapons and were bent on vengeance against “the foreign invaders”.
The Taleban, overthrown by the invasion, now wanted to export terror to the West, he said. “It’s acceptable to kill ordinary people in Europe because these are the people who have voted in the government,” he said.
“They came to our home and attacked our women and children,” he added. “The ordinary people of these countries are behind this — so we will not spare them. We will kill them and laugh over them like they are killing us and laughing at us.”
Amin said the Taleban was inspired by tactics used by insurgents in Iraq, namely remote-controlled bombs, land mines and suicide bombers. “They are our best tactic,” he said in an interview with the British TV channel in the Pakistani border region.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Thursday that suicide bomber tactics proved that Taleban rebels could not defeat multinational forces through conventional warfare.
“The Taleban and the other spoilers of the process of nation-building and democracy in Afghanistan are having to go with these kinds of horrible tactics because they know they cannot beat NATO in other ways,” he told BBC radio.
There are around 31,000 NATO-led International Security Assistance Force soldiers in Afghanistan trying to help the government establish stability against a resurgent Taleban to allow reconstruction.
Some of the 37 nations in the force have admitted to facing some of their fiercest fighting in decades.
Led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taleban effectively ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001.
