Tariq Ariam, a spokesman for the interior ministry in Kabul, Afghanistan, confirmed that terrorists fired 14 rockets into the city on Saturday morning. The rockets produced deafening explosions that rocked the city, killing three people and wounding 11 others. Many of the rockets landed close to the Green Zone area where several foreign firms and embassies are located.
“This morning, the terrorists fired 14 rockets on the city of Kabul,” interior ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said. “Unfortunately the rockets hit residential areas. Until now, three of our countrymen were martyred and 11 others were wounded.”
A spokesman for the police department in Kabul, Ferdaws Faramarz, said multiple rockets that killed and wounded people were fired into the city, and the attack seemed to damage a big medical facility wall. One of the fired rockets hit a police car and killed one police officer and wounded three others on the scene.
Although the Taliban has always launched several attacks against civilian and military targets in Kabul, they are yet to claim responsibility for this morning’s rocket attacks. However, city officials blame the attack on insurgents and proxies for the attacks that have been carried out in Kabul since early this year. In the last six months, the Taliban has claimed responsibility for 53 suicide attacks and 1,250 explosions that killed 1,210 people and wounded 2,500 others, Arian said, NY Times reports.
The representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban met in Doha a couple of months back to negotiate for people, but they are yet to come to an agreement, and pockets of violence still continue to erupt with casualties recorded all the time.
Considering that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on a tour of seven countries in that region, it is expected that he might meet with Taliban and Afghan negotiators to discuss a way for peace. Pompeo is also expected to meet with the ruler of Qatar, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and the foreign minister of the country in Qatar, given that the Taliban uses the country for diplomacy relations.
The Trump administration has announced plans to withdraw about 2,000 US soldiers from Afghanistan instead of the mid-2021 earlier agreed up between the Pentagon and the Taliban. Sources within Afghanistan have expressed worries that pulling out US troops would render the region unstable and that insurgents may take advantage of the withdrawal to wreak more havoc on innocent people and government facilities. How President-elect Joe Biden would handle the Taliban-Afghanistan debacle remains to be seen when he gets into office.
Source: theguardian.com
