North Atlantic Treaty Organisation said it was still investigating the cause of today’s crash of a C-130 military transport plane near Jalalabad in the east of the country.
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The crash comes with Afghan forces battling the Taliban which has blighted the country since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban has claimed credit for the crash.
On October 1, the Afghan Army regained control over most of Kunduz, which the Taliban captured in a pre-dawn attack on September 28.
Afghanistan’s Interior Minister Noor-ul-Haq Ulumi says his ministry has “complete oversight over all 34 provinces”.
The Taliban have been fighting to regain power since being toppled by a US-led intervention in 2001.
No Afghan security forces nor coalition troops are believed to have suffered casualties. There have been no fatalities on our side.
“Our forces did not get reinforcements on time”, Forotan said of the loss of Warduj district in Badakhshan.
The ICRC said it had supplies ready to be flown into Kunduz as soon as the airport reopened.
“Small guerrilla forces remain in various neighbourhoods”.
The Taliban is prone to claiming responsibility for any military aircraft incident, regardless of the group’s involvement. “We thank God we had no fatalities”, he said.
It was unclear how many insurgent fighters had been killed, but Mr Seddiqi said it was in the hundreds.
Good news… should not make us complacent.
“The war is ongoing”, he said.
The Taliban claim came as Amnesty global condemned the insurgents’ “reign of terror” in Kunduz, which fell to the militants five days ago in a lightning strike. Members of the 66th SFS routinely deploy to assist with security operations around the globe.
Renewed attacks by the Taliban have reportedly undermined the amount of support President Ashraf Ghani had garnered in Afghanistan.
The author of “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security”, Chayes tells The Takeaway about Kunduz’s strategic importance and what the city’s fall means for the Afghan government’s future.
The wounded included 64 children, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said.
The Taliban had laid siege to parts of Kunduz for several months, and government forces comfortably outnumbered the militants, making its capitulation all the more troubling. “There is so much fighting, no one can live there”.
The goal of the insurgency was not to hold Kunduz – they have neither the manpower nor firepower to consolidate control of a large urban center.
Initially, Mansoor’s appointment caused a huge and public rift in the Taliban, whose leadership is said to be based in neighboring Pakistan, when Mullah Omar’s family objected to the appointment, though they later rallied behind Mansoor. Lives and money continued to be squandered on a hopeless task.
Meanwhile, rights group Amnesty global that said the Taliban was behind “mass murder, gang rapes and house-to-house searches” in Kunduz.
Mansoor spoke to the AP by telephone from an unknown location. His remarks were posted on his Twitter account.
“They have now left the city“.
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However, residents told AFP on Friday morning the fighting appeared to have ceased.
