26 November 2008

MADRID – The Taliban has threatened to stage attacks on five Western nations deploying troops in Afghanistan in a video discovered by Spanish security forces, a local radio station said Wednesday.

The United States, Spain, France, Denmark and Australia are warned in the 42-minute video along with Israel, news radio Cadena Ser said.

It "threatens NATO and US troops with attacks against their interests inside and outside of Afghan territory if they do not withdraw from Afghanistan," the radio said.

Cadena Ser said the video was distributed on 14 November, five days after two Spanish soldiers were killed in a suicide bomb attack on their convoy in western Afghanistan.

In the opening minutes of the video, posted on the radio station's website, the flags of the six threatened nations and that of the United Nations are suddenly engulfed in flames and then replaced by a solitary Islamic flag.

A man who is thought to be a Taliban leader and surrounded by four armed men, is then shown speaking in Dari, a dialect of Persian widely spoken in Afghanistan. The faces of the five men are covered.

Spanish security forces have given "total credibility" to the video, which is believed to have been produced in northern Afghanistan and then broadcast on a jihadist television channel, the radio station said.

It was not clear when the video was recorded.

The authors of the video belong to an ethnically mixed group that is directed by the leader of the Taliban, Shaikh Abd al-Basit, and are considered "very aggressive and dangerous", Cadena Ser reported.

The Taliban were driven from government in a US-led invasion for sheltering Al-Qaeda after the September 2001 attacks.

But they have steadily increased their attacks in Afghanistan over two years, despite the efforts of the developing Afghan security forces and nearly 70,000 international soldiers, serving under NATO and as part of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom.

[AFP / Expatica]