In the audiotape, the fugitive leader of the ousted Taliban militia claimed his fighters still controlled large parts of Afghanistan.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan television on Sunday broadcast what it said was an audiotape from the fugitive leader of the ousted Taliban militia, Mullah Omar, claiming his fighters still controlled large parts of Afghanistan.
The authenticity of the tape, broadcast by private channel GEO, could not be independently verified. The network said it had been sent the voice clip via e-mail from the Afghan capital Kabul.
A purported Taliban spokesman quoted by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) denied that Omar had issued any new audiotape. The man said to be Omar was purportedly addressing a Taliban military council in the southern Afghan province of Helmand and claimed that his movement still held sway over large parts of Afghanistan. “Losing the capital of Afghanistan does not mean that Taliban have finished,”the network’s translation quoted him as saying.
Addressing Afghan President Hamid Karazai but not naming him directly, the man said: “If today the American military abandons you, you have no standing. Russia’s military also came to Afghanistan — remember its fate.” The man said that Afghanistan was a Muslim country where believers were in a majority and outsiders would never be able to impose their ideology there.
“The rulers of Kabul would not be able to run the country with the wisdom of others, and God willing they would be destroyed,”he said.
Meanwhile, President Karzai called Mullah Omar a coward, adding that he should come out of hiding and face justice. Karzai did not comment on the tape’s authenticity. But he told CNN's Late Edition television program that if Omar is “really in charge” he should come out of hiding and “face the danger that he is causing to hundreds of young people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
“It needs guts to do what he’s talking about, and he doesn’t have it,” he said. Omar and the Taliban, Karzai said, do not represent a threat to Afghanistan’s government.
“They exist in the form of attacking schools, attacking children, killing innocent people,” he said.
He would not indicate where he thought they were, but said Afghanistan was making progress in its search for the terrorist leaders.
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