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Austin: US ready to combat terrorist groups in Afghanistan

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (Photo by AP)

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said the United States is ready to prevent terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and Daesh-K from resuming activity in Afghanistan that would put his country at risk.

Speaking at the end of a four-day trip to the Persian Gulf on Thursday, Austin said the international community is monitoring the situation in Afghanistan to see if terrorist groups attempt to make a comeback in the region following the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan after implementing a policy of death and destruction there for two decades.

“I think the whole community is kind of watching to see what happens and whether or not al-Qaeda has the ability to regenerate in Afghanistan,” Austin said, according to The Associated Press.

“The nature of al-Qaeda and ISIS-K is they will always attempt to find space to grow and regenerate, whether it’s there, whether it’s in Somalia, or whether it’s in any other ungoverned space,” he added. “I think that’s the nature of the organization.”

Austin’s remarks came after US Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican voice on foreign policy matters, predicted that the United States “will be going back into Afghanistan,” after pulling out from the country after twenty years of war.

“We will be going back into Afghanistan,” Graham said in an interview on Tuesday. “We’ll have to because the threat will be so large.”

The pro-war senator said that Afghanistan will become a “cauldron” for terrorism despite assurances from Taliban leaders that they will not allow the country to become a safe haven for groups such as al-Qaeda and Daesh-K, a shadowy terrorist group that was not known to anyone before the recent deadly Kabul airport attack which killed scores of people. 

Graham predicted that the Taliban are “going to give safe haven to al-Qaeda who has ambitions to drive us out of the Mideast writ large and attack us because of our way of life.”

Tens of thousands of US forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and removed the Taliban from power. American forces occupied the country for about two decades on the pretext of fighting against terrorists. As the US forces left Afghanistan, the Taliban stormed into Kabul, weakened by continued prolonged foreign occupation.

The Taliban are now poised to run Afghanistan again two decades after they were removed from power by American forces following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded several Islamic countries and killed hundreds of thousands of people there.

Terrorists struck the Kabul airport on August 26, killing at least 180 people, mostly Afghan civilians and 13 US service members. The little-known shadowy terrorist group Daesh-K claimed the responsibility for the attack.

Following the bombing, the US military carried out several drone attacks across Afghanistan without getting permission from the Taliban, who denounced the strikes as a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

Although the US claimed that these drone attacks were aimed at destroying Daesh-K targets, the local sources reported nine civilian deaths in the vicinity of the Kabul International Airport as a result of the strikes.

In a recent article published on his website, independent American journalist Alex Rubinstein quoted Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the Daesh-K terrorist group a “tool” of the United States.

The analyst, who tweeted in May that the world would see the “rise of ISIS (Daesh)” in Afghanistan in the near future,” wrote that “mass-casualty terrorist attacks are repeatedly used as justification by the United States for continuing its occupations of foreign countries: the ‘counterterrorism mission,’ or the ‘terrorist threat.’”

 


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