Amid increasing concerns about instability in Afghanistan pouring over into the former Soviet republics and Russia, the Russian foreign ministry says it plans to supply small arms to Kabul though it will refrain from sending other weapons.

“The delivery will be in February and for now it’s more than sufficient,” said Russia’s special envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov. He was quoted Wednesday by the Russian news agency Interfax.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned leaders of Central Asian nations of a possible militant incursion from Afghanistan and has called the situation “close to critical.”

Facing threats from ISIS, al-Qaida and the Taliban, Kabul has made overtures to Moscow to increase military aid to Afghanistan as the United States attempts to wind down its presence there.

ap.org

The Foreign Office shared with the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs on Tuesday broad contours of Pakistan’s invo­lvement in the Saudi-led 34-nation counter-terrorism coalition and said it would not entail deployment of troops on a foreign soil.

The committee was given an in-camera briefing by the Foreign Office on the counter-terrorism coalition announced by Saudi Arabia and the diplomatic standoff between Iran and the kingdom which started with the execution of Saudi dissident Sheikh Nimr.

Conversations with members of the committee revealed that Pakistan was looking forward to training security forces of the member countries, providing military hardware and sharing intelligence. Additionally, there are indications that Pakistan would work with Saudi Arabia for developing a narrative that could counter extremist ideology. The two countries will involve their clergies for this purpose.

Pakistan earlier confirmed its participation in the coalition when it was announced last month, but said it would decide the extent of its participation after it received details about the initiative from Saudi Arabia.

Last week’s visits by Saudi Arabia’s defence and foreign affairs ministers provided clarity about the coalition to Pakistani authorities.

The sense emerging from the NA committee’s meeting has suggested that Pakistan may have picked the activities in which it intends to participate.

In a late evening statement on the committee’s meeting, the Foreign Office said: “The facets of cooperation and different activities of the coalition will be decided after consultative meetings, which will be hosted by Saudi Arabia in the near future.”

The members who spoke to Dawn said they had been assured that the policy of not committing troops in any conflict situation remained unchanged and would be strictly adhered to. Pakistan, they implied, would have limited cooperation with the coalition in line with its policy of fighting terrorism and extremism.

The committee’s chairman Awais Leghari said Pakistan’s participation in the alliance would not be against any country. It would be only against terrorism, he added.

“We want to send a clear message to our neighbour (Iran) that we are not trying to isolate anyone,” Mr Leghari said.

The committee also discussed tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran which, it is feared, may have a fallout on the region, particularly on Pakistan which has deep sectarian divisions.

The members were told that Pakistan would continue to pursue a balanced approach on the dispute and might contribute to defusing the situation at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and other multilateral forums. A special session of the OIC is planned for Jan 16.

The FO statement tried to dilute the impression about Pakistan’s even-handed approach in the dispute. It said: “The adviser informed the committee that Saudi Arabia is a close friend of Pakistan. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia enjoy multi-faceted cooperation, including in the fields of defence and counter-terrorism. Pakistan has affirmed that any threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity will evoke strong response from Pakistan. Recent high-level contacts between the two countries have further strengthened these ties.”

The committee, according to members, was informed that Pakistan felt that it was still not the right time for mediating and would wait for the right opportunity.

Sharing their assessment of the situation, FO officials said there was also no immediate threat of the situation degenerating into an armed conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Mr Leghari said political parties and the government were now on the same page vis-à-vis the Saudi-Iran dispute and participation in the counter-terrorism coalition. He said the meeting provided an opportunity to the members to register their parties’ point of view on the issue.

Mr Leghari said the members had expressed their concern over the emerging issue and hoped that parliament and the country’s political leadership “would defuse the tensions between the two brotherly countries to avoid disunity in Muslim Ummah which can benefit the enemies”.

He said the committee members helped in forging a consensus across the party lines on this critical issue.

dawn.com

Afghan security forces exchanged fire with gunmen barricaded in a house near the Pakistan consulate in the eastern city of Jalalabad on Wednesday after a suicide bomber blew himself up, officials said.

At least six people were killed and 11 wounded in the suicide attack and subsequent fighting, they said.

The attack on the consulate, which comes amid efforts to restart the stalled peace process with the Taliban and ease diplomatic tensions between India and Pakistan, resembled an attack on the Indian consulate in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif last week.

Witnesses in Jalalabad, the main trade gateway to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan, said heavy gunfire and a series of explosions could be heard and residents and children from a nearby school had been evacuated.

Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said a suicide bomber had tried to join a queue of people seeking visas to Pakistan and blew himself up after being prevented from entering the building.

Two policemen were killed in the blast, the interior ministry said in a statement. Two other attackers took refuge in an empty government guest house nearby, it said.

The area had been sealed off and security forces were engaged in “eliminating” the attackers, it said.

There was no claim of responsibility.

Last week, a group of attackers barricaded themselves in a house and resisted security forces for about 24 hours after a suicide attack on the Indian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif.

The group responsible for that attack has not been identified but the incident fuelled suspicion in India about militants sponsored from Pakistan and it cast a shadow over the latest effort to improve relations.

Tension between India and Pakistan has risen since the attack on its consulate and on an Indian air base that killed seven Indian military personnel near their border. India has blamed the attacks on Pakistan-based militants.

A rare meeting between the foreign secretaries of both countries had been tentatively scheduled for later this week, but it is unclear if it would still happen after the attacks.

Delegates from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States also met this week to try to resurrect efforts to end nearly 15 years of bloodshed in Afghanistan, even as fighting with the Taliban intensifies.

Pakistan says many Pakistani Taliban militants, who are separate from but allied with the Afghan Taliban, and are fighting to bring down the Pakistani state, have sought refuge in Afghanistan from a Pakistani army offensive.

In Pakistan on Wednesday, at least 14 people were killed in a blast near a polio vaccination centre in the southwestern city of Quetta.

thepeninsulaqatar.com/

The Indonesian government remains concerned about the threat posed by the self-described Islamic State, despite the group’s recent territorial losses in Iraq and Syria including the ceding of the key city of Ramadi to the Iraqi army in late December.

“Indonesia is very vulnerable,” said Dewi Fortuna Anwar, an adviser to Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla, airing Jakarta’s fears that Indonesian members of IS could return home to carry out terrorist attacks.

“We are exploring the role played by religious leaders to develop counter narratives,” Anwar said, discussing the ideological appeal of the extremist group to hundreds of Indonesians thought to have traveled to Iraq and Syria in recent years. Anwar was speaking in Singapore at a regional forum organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Indonesia is home to 210 million Muslims — more than any other country — and tens of millions of Indonesians are members of two mass Muslim organizations, known as the Muhammidiyah and the Nahdlatul Ulama. The latter has campaigned loudly against IS, which it describes as promoting a “shallow” interpretation of Islam to justify violence.

Indonesian Islam, often described as “moderate,” is infused with pre-existing beliefs such as Buddhism and Hinduism — the “Islam Nusantara” (Islam of the archipelago) brand promoted by Nahdlatul Ulama. However, the country has seen several deadly terrorist attacks carried out by groups linked to al-Qaeda, including a 2002 bombing on the island of Bali, one of around 6,000 inhabited islands across the vast Indonesian archipelago; 202 people, many of them foreign tourists visiting the popular resort island, died in that attack.

To help counter extremism, Anwar said, the government is planning a new Islamic university which is intended as an alternative for pious students seeking to pursue religious studies in the Middle East where, the government fears, some Indonesians pick up a more confrontational take on Islam than is taught at home.

For now, however, the Indonesian government faces the threat of attacks by Indonesian IS members who have returned home, or by fellow travelers.

About 400 Indonesians and several dozen people from neighboring Malaysian are thought to have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join IS in recent years. Although IS had lost around 15% of its territory in Iraq and Syria by the end of 2015, those recent military losses have not “diminished the desire to leave [for Iraq and Syria]” among those Indonesians who want to volunteer, said Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict. “We are still seeing families trying to leave,” she added.

Fighting skills

According to Jones, most Southeast Asians who travel to the Middle East to join IS do so without intending to return home. In contrast, those from the region who fought alongside al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s did so with the intention of acquiring fighting skills to be used subsequently in their homelands.

Most IS leaders believe that the creation of a caliphate — a form of Islamic empire — in the Middle East is a divinely ordained mission. Deserters face execution and experts say that the threat of punishment, along with the religious zeal of volunteers mean that those who join IS are likely to remain, even in the face of battlefield losses.

“They believe that they can start a new life, a utopia,” Maszlee Malik of the International Islamic University Malaysia told the conference.

In proportion to population, very few Indonesians are thought to have joined IS compared with recruitment from European countries. Jones estimates that about two per million have signed up from Indonesia, compared with 40 per million from Belgium, for example.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of European citizens who traveled to fight in Syria and Iraq have since returned to their home countries, prompting concerns about sleeper cells that may be awaiting orders from IS for terror attacks on the scale of the Nov. 13 Paris shootings, which left 130 people dead.

In December, Indonesian police said they had foiled an IS-linked terrorist attack planned for the Christmas and New Year period, suggesting that IS could replicate the attacks it has carried out in France, Lebanon and Turkey, where yesterday 10 foreign tourists were killed in an IS suicide attack in Istanbul. Almost 2,000 police and troops are on a manhunt in Sulawesi, a mountainous island east of Borneo, for Santoso, a fugitive described as Islamic State’s most high profile supporter in Indonesia.

Asked by the Nikkei Asian Review if IS could lash out in Indonesia or Malaysia if it continues to suffer losses in Iraq and Syria, Jones compared the aggressive tactics of IS in Europe with its seeming reluctance so far to launch attacks in Muslim-majority countries in Southeast Asia.

“We may be on the cusp of a change now, but there hasn’t been any indication so far that ‘ISIS Central’ [the group’s leaders in Iraq and Syria] has an interest in Southeast Asia,” she noted.

In an effort to halt the spread of militant Islam and sectarian tensions, Indonesia is broadening its diplomacy, dispatching Foregn Minister Retno Marsudi to Riyadh and Tehran this week in an attempt to mediate between two antagonists who back different sides in the brutal conflict in Syria.

Shi’ite Iran backs the Syrian government, while Sunni Saudi Arabia has supported and funded the Syrian rebellion which started in 2011.

Since then, the rise of IS has sharpened sectarian tensions in the Middle East and in Persian Gulf states, where Sunni and Shia factions, backed by states in the region and outside, are at war in several theaters, including Lebanon and Yemen as well as Syria and Iraq.

Iran, the world’s biggest Shia majority country, was incensed by Saudi Arabia’s recent execution of a prominent Shi’ite cleric from eastern Saudi Arabia, prompting concerns that the complex and interlinked wars in the region could spread, in turn increasing the possibility of terrorist attacks elsewhere, including in Indonesia, where the country’s Shi’ite minority was listed by police as a target of the foiled New Year IS plot to mount terrorist attacks.

nikkei.com

Intelligence authorities revealed that eight Malaysian children were being trained to become Islamic State fighters.

Intelligence authorities revealed that eight Malaysian children were being trained to become Islamic State (IS) fighters, local media reported on Tuesday (Jan 12).

Investigations are continuing into details of the training camps, which are believed to be in Syria and Iraq, Bukit Aman Special Branch director Mohamad Fuzi Harun told reporters at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.

“These children were brought in to the war-torn countries by their parents, who are raising them to be IS fighters,” he was reported as saying by The Star.

He added that 47 Malaysians had joined Islamic State, including 12 women, and that authorities were actively attempting to bring them home.

“But they have refused to come back. Their ultimate goal is to fight and die as martyrs,” he said.

Last month, Malaysian police warned that children as young as two were being trained overseas to become the next generation of terrorists.

Video was shown of children receiving military training and swearing allegiance to Islamic State and its leader.

At the time, a counter-terrorism official expressed fears that similar camps could be set up in Malaysia.

channelnewsasia.com

At least 15 Daesh fighters were killed in drone strikes in Acheen district of Nangarhar province.

Col. Hazrat Hussain Mashriqiwal Nangarhar Headquarters press chief told BNA, Moreover, 11 Taliban were killed and 3 others injured in air strikes in Kot district of the province.

According to another report, as a result of insider conflicts among ISIS in Chaparhar district of the province 5 of them were killed and 7 others were wounded.

bakhtarnews.com.af

When representatives of four nations meet Monday to plan peace talks aimed at ending nearly four decades of fighting in Afghanistan, the most important figure is almost sure to be absent.

Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, the leader of the Taliban, is likely to remain in hiding when U.S., Afghan, Pakistani and Chinese officials meet in Islamabad to lay the groundwork for future talks. Nonetheless, his shadow will hang over the proceedings.

In the six months since word leaked that the Taliban’s founder, Mohammad Omar, had died in 2013, Mansour has proved to be nearly as enigmatic as his reclusive, one-eyed predecessor. Many current and former Taliban members say Mansour is a moderate who represents Afghanistan’s best chance in more than a decade to strike a deal with the Islamists. He is a pragmatist, they say, who, as the Taliban’s aviation minister, recruited communists to keep the nation’s airplanes operating.

“In the Taliban movement, there are not a lot of people like Mullah Mansour,” said Waheed Mojda, a former Taliban diplomat who is now an analyst in Kabul. “He is a very good man for peace talks. He is a man who understands the situation of the world and not just the continuation of fighting.”

Under Mansour’s command, however, the Taliban has not just continued to fight, it has excelled at it. In October, the Taliban overran the northern city of Kunduz. A month later, the insurgents swept through the southern province of Helmand, capturing the city of Sangin. Although both cities were eventually regained by Afghan forces, the Taliban controls more territory than at any point since it was driven from power in 2001.

Despite those gains, Mansour has faced opposition from within Taliban ranks. He has been accused by splinter groups of ruthlessly assassinating rivals and endorsing democracy, among other things. Some disaffected Taliban members have even joined their archrival, the Islamic State.

“We don’t trust Mansour,” said Abdul Manan Niazi, the spokesman for one Taliban splinter group. “He has even said it’s possible that he will accept a democratic system in Afghanistan.”

Adding to the confusion surrounding Mansour are claims that he was wounded in a shootout last month near his home in Quetta, Pakistan.

“He’s dead,” Niazi told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “Mansour is done. He’s finished.”

Most analysts disagree, pointing to an audiotape released after the alleged shootout as evidence that Mansour is alive. But uncertainty clings to both Mansour and the upcoming talks.

His life is mostly a mystery. According to his official Taliban biography, he was born in 1968 in the village of Band-i-Taimoor in rural Kandahar, a poppy-growing province at the heart of the drug trade, and was wounded several times while fighting the Soviets as a teenager.

“He was an ordinary fighter, said Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, a former Taliban commander who fought the Soviets alongside Mansour. “I don’t remember him being good at shooting or blowing up tanks.”

If Mansour was exceptional, Agha said, it was because he was more patient and tolerant than most other mujahideen. “From a religious and personal point of view, he was a moderate person.”

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Mansour studied Islamic texts at a madrassa in the Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan. Shortly after Omar founded the Taliban in 1994 to end corruption and infighting among the mujahideen, Mansour hired five buses and drove 150 men to Kandahar to join, according to journalist Sami Yousafzai.

When the Taliban captured Kandahar, Omar appointed Mansour head of airport security. And when the Taliban swept into Kabul a year later, Mansour became aviation minister.

Mansour’s allies and enemies alike point to his time in that post as proof of his character. Like other Taliban ministers, Mansour had no technical expertise. He had inherited a fleet of damaged planes but had no idea how to fix them. Unlike other ministers, he actively recruited communists who had fled the country.

“He started to collect technicians and engineers,” Mojda said, “and slowly, slowly, they started to repair these aircraft.”

Mansour flew to Germany in 1998 to buy airplane and helicopter parts, according to Yousafzai.

To his supporters, Mansour’s five years in charge of aviation shows flexibility that bodes well for a post-conflict Afghanistan. But to his detractors, it reveals dangerous signs of self-interest.

“He was trafficking drugs using the airlines,” said Niazi, now Mansour’s rival but at the time a Taliban governor and spokesman. “I have seen it with my own eyes. He was sending drugs to Dubai inside candy wrappers.”

Current and former officials from the United States, the United Nations and Afghanistan concur.

“Mullah Mansour, when he was not yet a leader of the Taliban, was among those Taliban involved in drug trafficking,” said Hashim Wahdatyar, Afghanistan program officer for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “But the whole Taliban regime was . . . and still is,” he added, alleging that Mansour sits atop a drug network that nets the Taliban more than $200 million a year.

When the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban in late 2001, Mansour surrendered and was allowed to return to Kandahar, according to journalist Bette Dam. But after U.S. forces repeatedly raided his house, Mansour fled to Pakistan. From there, he helped plot the group’s resurgence, persuading many to rejoin.

As other Taliban commanders were arrested or imprisoned, Mansour rose through the ranks. When Omar’s deputy was arrested in Pakistan in 2010, Mansour was named as his replacement.

Mansour became Omar’s right-hand man “kind of by default,” said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. Again, however, Mansour proved surprisingly proficient. “He effectively led the Taliban during a very complicated time, which was the U.S. surge in 2010, when Obama wanted to kick the Taliban over,” he said.

When Omar died in April 2013, Mansour and a few other Taliban members met at his deathbed to choose a successor, Mojda said. The decision had to be made before burying Omar, he said, so not all members of the shura, or advisory council, were invited. Those in attendance chose Mansour, but they also decided to keep both Omar’s death and the change in leadership a secret, Mojda said.

For two years, Mansour allegedly issued announcements in Omar’s name, including some related to a Taliban political office in Qatar that engaged in secret peace talks with U.S. officials. The Taliban was engaged in peace talks last July when news broke that Omar was long dead. The talks foundered as some Taliban members accused Mansour of usurping the throne.

“He led a coup against the leadership,” Niazi said. “They say Mullah Omar was sick and he died as a result of that illness, but it’s most likely that he was poisoned.”

Other Taliban leaders also defected, with a few joining the Islamic State’s growing movement. By and large, however, Mansour has kept his movement together, according to a Taliban member who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the danger in talking about the group to outsiders.

“Mullah Mansour has faced serious challenges as the field commanders and fighters asked questions why Mullah Omar’s death news was kept secret from them for two years,” he said. “Some commanders publicly raised the issue and expressed suspicion over his alleged role, but he overcame the leadership crisis, and most of his critics accepted him as the leader of the movement.”

Mansour silenced some critics by paying them off with money or powerful positions, analysts say. Others were killed.

As his forces made advances last year, Mansour alternated between stridency and openness to peace talks. On Saturday, the Taliban released a cagily worded statement, saying that “jihad in Afghanistan is a legal right of Afghans, because our country is under the U.S. occupation,” yet “political efforts are also underway.”

No Taliban members are expected to attend Monday’s meeting, but Ruttig said he sees signs that the group under Mansour is ready to share power. “I think the Taliban has learned,” he said. “They have become more adaptable to the outside world and more responsive to what other Afghans think.”

He warned against calling Mansour a moderate, however.

“The Taliban is a pretty violent movement,” he said. “But we need to think about the conflict in Afghanistan and if there is a way to break out of that vicious circle going back to almost 40 years. If you have an adversary who is willing to talk, you should use that.”

washingtonpost.com

Four Islamic terrorist groups in the southern Philippines have merged to form a satellite extension of Islamic State, according to a video posted on a jihadi website.

The video purports to show militants carrying Islamic flags and the heavily armed commanders of the groups who had declared their allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

watoday.com.au

At least 47 anti-government armed militants have been killed in the latest wave of counter-terrorism operations across Afghanistan, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) said Sunday.

The counter-terrorism operations by the Afghan national security forces have been rampant during the recent week as the anti-government armed militant groups have stepped up terrorist attacks across the country including the capital Kabul.

“In past 24 hours, Afghan National Police conducted several anti-terrorism joint operations with Afghan National Army and NDS to clear some of the areas from terrorists and enemies of peace and stability of Afghanistan,” MoI said.

According to MoI, the operations were conducted in Nangarhar, Takhar, Faryab, Kandahar, Zabul, Maidan Wardak, Ghazni, Paktika, Paktiya, Herat and Helmand provinces, as a result 47 armed insurgents were killed, seven wounded and eight others were arrested by Afghan National Security Forces.

Also, during these operations, Afghan National Security Forces discovered and confiscated light and heavy rounds ammunition, MoI added.

The anti-government armed militant groups have not commented regarding the report so far.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) urged the Afghan citizens to assist the Afghan national security forces in maintaining peace and stability by reporting suspicious terrorist related activities.

khaama.com