KABUL – Afghanistan’s Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen said the Talibanhad condemned the string of astonishing terrorist attacks on the UnitedStates almost 2 decades ago as no ‘Afghans were involved’ in them.
Recalling the past events in a prime time show on a Pakistani private newschannel, he said “we condemned the incident, Abdul Salam Zaeef was theambassador to Pakistan and I was an aide. We called a press conference andwe condemned the attacks and had announced to unearth the facts behind thescenes”.
Commenting on the aftermath of the US invasion in Afghanistan, he said “weasked that the matter be resolved through dialogue, and the result of aninvasion is before you now”.
He went on to say that “It won’t be a good result for you, so it is betterfor you and for us also, having fought against an invasion [for so long]and many people being martyred, so we do not want this”.
“Nobody listened to us at that time and invaded Afghanistan and occupied itthrough sophisticated weapons”, he said.
Responding to a query, Shaheen said “Al Qaeda at the time had not informedTaliban or Mullah Muhammad Omar over such a move, and that the Taliban, whowere in power at the time, got surprised over the attacks”.
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Adding that “Following the recent takeover Taliban have made a policy tonever allow the use of Afghan soil against any other country. We have madea policy and will also make a law besides monitoring such groups. Oursecurity forces, our intelligence forces will be more active, he said.
He also negated the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan saying “we arefully aware which countries came with such reports. It is countries andcircles against us that provide information — baseless claims — to them, onthe basis of which they make their reports. And we have rejected theseseveral times. The reports do not reflect the ground reality”, he opined.
He also reiterated that the Taliban spokesman said that the group hadpledged that they will not allow any such fund-raising centre, trainingcentre or recruitment centre to function and asked countries to indicatewhere they may have found such places to exist.
