The Afghanistan government said that over 10,000 Taliban terrorists have entered Afghanistan and these terrorists have been trained by a Pakistani institution and are financed by Islamabad. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said that there is no way of knowing who is supporting the Taliban amongst 30,000 daily commuters.
In a video message, President Ashraf Ghani’s spokesman said that thousands of terrorists enter Afghanistan from Pakistan to carry out the country’s proxy war, as per Afghanistan Times report. “We have accurate intelligence reports that more than 10,000 Pakistanis have entered Afghanistan from Pakistan while another 15,000 are encouraged to come. This shows that a regular institution is training and financing Taliban,” the message said.
Prior to this, President Ghani had said that 10,000 foreign terrorists came from Pakistan to Afghanistan in a month.
Pakistan PM has said that most of the refugees who came to his country from Afghanistan “sympathise” with the Taliban and there is no way of knowing who backs the terrorist group among the 30,000 daily commuters, as per The Express Tribune report.
Khan told Afghan journalists in Islamabad on Thursday, “Pakistan has no way of knowing who is supporting the Taliban or not.” He claimed that there were about three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and “almost all of them were Pashtuns”. “Most of them, if not all, sympathise with the Taliban,” said Khan and added, “How can we check (as to who was going to fight) when 25,000 to 30,000 Afghans travel to and from Afghanistan every day.”
He also stated that there were camps in Pakistan where up to 100,000 to 50,000 refugees lived. “How can we go to these camps and find out how many of them support the Taliban?,” questioned Khan.
Despite ample evidence that suggests the contrary, Pakistan PM also claimed that his country is not “responsible” for the actions of the Taliban. “What the Taliban are doing or are not doing has nothing to do with us. We are neither responsible nor the spokesperson for the Taliban,” remarked Khan.
A few days earlier, Pakistan PM, in an interview with a US network, said the Taliban are “not some military outfits but normal civilians”. How Pakistan is supposed to hunt them down when it has three million Afghan refugees at the border, Khan questioned.
“Now, there are camps of 500,000 people; there are camps of 100,000 people. And Taliban are not some military outfits, they are normal civilians. And if there are some civilians in these camps, how is Pakistan supposed to hunt these people down? How can you call them sanctuaries?” he argued in an interview with PBS NewsHour aired Tuesday night.
