Taliban urge Pakistan not to blame them for domestic violence

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ISLAMABAD (AP) Afghanistan’s Taliban-appointed foreign minister on Wednesday urged Pakistani authorities to investigate the reasons for militant violence in their country instead of blaming Afghanistan.

Amir Khan Muttaqi’s comments came two days after Pakistani officials said the attackers who masterminded the suicide bombing that killed 101 people in northwest Pakistan on Monday staged the attack on the ground Afghan.

During a groundbreaking ceremony for a drug treatment center in the capital of Kabul on Wednesday, Muttaqi called on the Pakistani government to launch a serious investigation into Monday’s mosque bombing in Peshawar. .

He insisted that Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, saying that if it was, attacks would also have taken place in other countries.

If someone says that Afghanistan is the center of terrorism, he is also saying that terrorism has no borders, Muttaqi said. If terrorism had emanated from Afghanistan, it would also have affected China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan or Iran.

We need to cooperate with each other, instead of blaming each other, he said. The two countries are brothers and should work together in a peaceful environment.

Pakistani authorities said on Wednesday the death toll in Monday’s suicide bombing at a mosque in Peshawar had risen by one to 101. It is unclear how the suicide bomber was able to slip into the fortified compound of the police in a high security area with other government buildings.

Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif on Tuesday accused the Pakistani Taliban, or Tahreek-e Taliban-Pakistani, or TTP, of carrying out the attack, saying they were operating from neighboring Afghan territory. He called on the Afghan Taliban to take action against them. A TTP commander had previously claimed responsibility, but a spokesman for the group later dismissed the TTP from the carnage, saying it was not its policy to attack mosques.

During the nearly 20-year US war against the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, militant groups flourished in Pakistan’s tribal regions along the border and around Peshawar. Like the Taliban, they have taken root among the majority ethnic Pashtuns in the region and in the city.

Some groups have been encouraged by Pakistani intelligence agencies. But others turned their guns on the government, angered by the heavy security crackdown and frequent US airstrikes in the border region targeting al-Qaeda and other militants.

The leader of the anti-government groups was the Pakistani Taliban. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, he waged a brutal campaign of violence across the country. Peshawar was the scene of one of the TTP’s bloodiest attacks in 2014, on an army-run public school, which killed nearly 150 people, mostly schoolchildren.

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