Posted by
on Thursday, March 08, 2007 4:01:27 PM
Allah @ Hot Air picked up a bombshell of a news report from the AP. It seems that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Afghan warlord formerly associated with Taliban forces has decided it is time to make a deal:
Fugitive Afghan rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The Associated Press that his forces have ended cooperation with the Taliban and suggested that he was open to talks with embattled President Hamid Karzai. In a video response to questions submitted by AP, Hekmatyar said that his group contacted Taliban leaders in 2003 and agreed to wage a joint jihad, or holy war, against American troops.
"The jihad went into high gear but later it gradually went down as certain elements among the Taliban rejected the idea of a joint struggle against the aggressor," Hekmatyar said in the video, which was received Thursday. Hekmatyar wore glasses and a black turban as he spoke in front of a plain white wall at an undisclosed location.
He offered no details of the split or its timing, but said his forces were now mounting only restricted operations, partly because of a lack of resources.
"It was not a good move by the Taliban to disassociate themselves from the joint struggle," he said. "Presently we have no contact with the Taliban."
Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami fighters, who have been most active in eastern Afghanistan, were central to the CIA-backed resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and in the civil war that followed, but were sidelined by the Taliban militia's rise to power in the mid-1990s.
Hekmatyar nevertheless opposed the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 that pushed the Taliban from power, and his followers have since waged a campaign of violence against American and allied forces. Hekmatyar's exact whereabouts have been unknown since he returned to Afghanistan from exile in Iran in 2002.
Allah notes that this gfuy has played this game before, using his supposed capitulation as a publicity stunt, but Dr. Rusty Shackleford @ My Pet Jawa noticed that US and NATO troops had nabbed the deputy Taliban commander operating out of South Waziristan:
American troops in Afghanistan arrested on Thursday the deputy head of the Taliban fighters active in the Pakistani tribal area of Waziristan, according to a report on the Arab satellite television channel Al Jazeera. A unit of US special forces penetrated the town of Loramani in Waziristan which border Afghanistan, capturing the Taliban leader Mullah Hakimallah Mansub.
A report on Al Jazeera also said that the Taliban had carried out two suicide attacks against NATO troops in the southern Afghan region of Kandahar. Some eyewitnesses said that they had seen at least two NATO vehicles destroyed in the same area.
Could this be why Hekmatyar decided to play ball all of a sudden? A little more fearful, a little less bold now that the surge is erupting in Iraq and Afghanistan? Maybe. Time will tell what occurs now. I am sure our interrogators are working overtime to get what they can out of him. It also seems that this was our "high value target" that our forces were going after over the weekend. Let us see if we can roll him for bin Laden's whereabouts.
Marcie