The Taliban dismissed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s U.S.-backed peace offer in a statement issued Tuesday announcing the start of their annual spring offensive, which the terrorists vowed will be “mainly” focused “on crushing, killing and capturing American invaders and their supporters.”
Taliban jihadists note that their spring offensive “is based on guerrilla, offensive, infiltrated, and various other new and intricate tactics against the new war strategy of the enemy, mainly focusing on crushing, killing and capturing American invaders and their supporters,” adding:
Its primary target will be the American invaders and their intelligence agents. Their internal supporters will be dealt with as a secondary target while the present and future mischievous plots of the mischief-mongers will be nipped in the bud. In-sha Allah!!! (God willing)
These operations will be launched … with the help of Almighty Allah throughout the country, beginning with the cries of ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ (Allah is the Greatest), a terror casting and heart-piercing war cry for the enemy.
As of October 2017, the Taliban controlled or contested nearly half of Afghanistan, with their power mainly concentrated in rural regions, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a watchdog agency, noted this year.
In attempting to justify its spring offensive, the Taliban highlights the ongoing American military presence in Afghanistan, adding:
The newly adopted war strategy of [U.S. President Donald] Trump has been ruthlessly implemented in the villages and rural areas against our oppressed Afghan people for the past nine months. Thousands of additional foreign forces are being deployed inside Afghanistan and they are supplied with new devastating weapons and vast military authorities.
Marking a significant departure from his predecessors, President Trump authorized the U.S. military to target the Taliban’s top source of funding—opium and heroin—with airstrikes that have already deprived the group of tens of millions in proceeds.
The Taliban also cited the allegedly ongoing presence of “secret centers for obscenity, alcohol, licentious movies, [the] invitation to revoked religion and various other illegitimate activities” as one of the top reasons for launching its new offensive.
Taliban terrorists stress that their “sole objective is … to establish an Islamic system … in complete compliance with the rules and regulations of the [opium-funded] Islamic Emirate [Taliban] and demarcated by Islamic Sharia.”
Sharia refers to a set of strict rules that are expected to govern all aspects of a Muslim’s life.
In February, Afghan President Ghani offered the Taliban a truce and recognition as a legitimate political group, to no avail.
U.S. Gen. John Nicholson, the top commander of American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, described the proposal on Monday as the “best opportunity to end” the nearly 17-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the Taliban voiced their rejection of the offer in their spring offensive statement, attributing their position on the ongoing presence of U.S.-NATO forces.
The Taliban has long insisted on a complete withdrawal of U.S.-NATO forces from Afghanistan as a precondition for peace negotiations, a stance that the United States refuses to accept.
In the statement, the Taliban describes the Kabul-led peace efforts as a “deceptive.”
The proposals are “nothing but a conspiracy orchestrated by the foreign occupiers for enervating, crushing and eventually pacifying the ongoing legitimate Afghan resistance and are not efforts for ending the war and restoring lasting peace,” the terrorist group argued, adding:
Their [U.S.] main effort is to deviate the public opinion from the illegitimate foreign occupation of the country, as the Americans have no serious or sincere intentions of bringing the war to an end. Rather they want to intensify and prolong it by engulfing Afghanistan as well as the whole region in its flames, thus securing chances of their further influence and interference.
The Trump administration has made “reconciliation” between Kabul and the Taliban a significant component of its strategy to end the war.
Taliban jihadists “cannot win” under the level of pressure Trump’s strategy is applying on the terrorist group, the commander declared in November 2017.
“In the face of this pressure, the Taliban cannot win. Their choices are to reconcile, live in irrelevance, or die,” Nicholson proclaimed.
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