PESHAWAR: A top envoy of Afghanistan said on Wednesday that the Taliban administration had already issued a decree that launching attacks in “Pakistan is not jihad”.
The acting consul general at the Afghan Consulate in Peshawar, Hafiz Mohibullah Shakir, told a private news channel that the defense ministry of Afghanistan had also made it clear that attacking Pakistan did not fall under jihad.
The Pakistani government has time and again stressed that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants have safe havens in Afghanistan and that the neighbouring country’s soil was being used for attacks on Pakistan.
Since the Afghan Taliban took power in 2021, Pakistan has witnessed a rise in terror attacks, with 2023 being the deadliest in 8 years, with officials also saying that Afghan citizens were involved in attacks on security forces.
Pakistan’s special representative on Afghanistan, Asif Durrani, said that the banned TTP’s attacks on Pakistan along the borders have surged and that they were “taking shelter on the Afghan soil”.
Pakistan’s Caretaker Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani and his Taliban counterpart, Amir Khan Muttaqi, met on the sidelines of a China-hosted international conference earlier this month.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement, said that Jilani highlighted that challenges confronting regional peace and stability be addressed in a collaborative spirit through collective efforts and strategies.
Now, the Afghan diplomat said that the TTP militants had migrated to Afghanistan during former US-backed Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s government.
The envoy said that he wanted to make it clear that no attacks would be launched from Afghanistan on Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Ultimatum to Illegal Immigrants
Talking about Pakistan’s ultimatum to illegal immigrants to leave, Shakir said that they had no objections to the decision taken regarding Afghan refugees, but an appropriate method needs to be adopted to send them back.
He said that it would be better if the Afghan refugees were given time to wrap up their affairs in Pakistan as the Afghan government had also made arrangements for their arrival in the country.
