A gunfight between two Pakistani tribes over disputed mountain territory close to the Afghan border on Saturday left at least 47 people dead and 25 others injured, officials and local sources said.

A security source told AFP that the Mada Khel and Paipali Kabul Khel tribes of North Waziristan had been engaged in intense frighting since Friday to try to capture a mountain, which both groups claim.

“The fight in Laoaara Mandi village in Data Khel area has so far left 47 people dead and 25 others injured,” the official said.

He added that the fight for occupation of the mountain is still ongoing.

Locals in the area confirmed the violence and said that the tribes support separate militant groups in the region.

Another source, who is close to the political administration in the area, gave a lower toll, saying that 36 people were killed and 15 were injured.

North Waziristan is one of Pakistan’s seven semi autonomous tribal districts where Pakistani forces have little control and militant groups thrive. The US has in past branded these areas the most dangerous in the world, saying they are hubs for Taliban and Al-Qaeda-led militants.

Tribes in these areas often fight bloody battles to assert their control over the region.

Pakistan’s army started an offensive in June last year to clear the region of Taliban militants and has since claimed significant success in the operation, named Zarb-e-Azb.

Tajikistan is debating legislation to ban Arabic names as part of an ongoing campaign against Islam that has seen men being forced to shave their beards and women in hijab being labelled prostitutes.

The president, Emomali Rahmon, ordered his rubber-stamp parliament to consider a bill that would forbid the registration of names considered too Arabic, an official in the Justice Ministry’s department of civil registry told Interfax.

“After the adoption of these regulations, the registry offices will not register names that are incorrect or alien to the local culture, including names denoting objects, flora and fauna, as well as names of Arabic origin,” Jaloliddin Rahimov was quoted as saying.

Though the law would only apply to babies born after it is passed, some parliamentarians are reportedly demanding that existing names that are Arab-sounding should be changed to Tajik-sounding ones.

If parents cannot come up with a name on their own, the Justice Ministry is preparing a list of recommended ones.

Islam is by far the largest religion in Tajikistan, practised by about 98% of the population. Religious observance has been on the rise recently, much to the dismay of the secular government which cites fears that the country’s disenfranchised and poverty stricken villages are becoming recruiting grounds for militants.

As well as clamping down on beards and hijab, authorities have closed independent mosques and encouraged imams to use their sermons to praise the president. Human rights groups say Muslims are regularly arrested on trumped-up charges that conflate faith with terrorism.

But the latest measure casts such a wide net that, if taken literally, it could catch the country’s biggest fish. The president’s name, Emomali, is a version of Imam Ali, Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, the fourth caliph for Sunnis and the first imam for Shia Muslims.

A Taliban assault that threatened to overrun a northern Afghan city involved a number of foreign fighters, officials said Saturday, a battle that saw at least 100,000 people flee their homes.

Kunduz’s provincial governor and its police chief suggested the foreign fighters could be part of a small contingent of militants who pledged their loyalty to an Islamic State group affiliate in Afghanistan, but offered no other evidence to support their claim.

The battle in Kunduz began April 24. Thousands of army reinforcements have been deployed to the city. Officials had feared in the days following the attack that Kunduz could fall to the Taliban.

Provincial Gov. Mohammad Omer Safi said the bodies of 18 foreigners had been retrieved from the battlefield, found to be from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Chechnya.

Safi said the foreign fighters provided technical and financial support to the Taliban fighters who he believed were fresh graduates from madrassas in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan with little battlefield experience.

“Our forces have seen well-dressed forces with covered faces. We can’t ignore the presence of Daesh here, but we also heard that there were differences among insurgents themselves,” said provincial police chief Gen. Abdul Sabor Nasrati, using an Arabic acronym from the Islamic State group.

At least 100,000 people have fled their homes around Kunduz amid the assault, said Mans Nyberg, a spokesman for the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees in Kabul.

The Taliban’s spring offensive has seen the militants take their anti-government fight to most regions of the country, with eastern areas near the Pakistan border, like Paktia province. On Thursday, gunmen there killed a police officer and a civilian at a cricket match and kidnapped 36 people, said Gen. Zelmai Oryakhail, the province’s police chief.

All but three of the abductees had been freed, he said. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though officials suspect the Taliban carried it out.

Pakistan’s Taliban has claimed responsibility for downing a military helicopter in an incident that has left at least six people dead, including the Norwegian and Filipino envoys to the country.

The helicopter was one of three carrying a delegation of envoys to inspect projects on a three-day trip to Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan territory, where they were set to meet with prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

Leif Larsen, the Norwegian envoy, and Domingo Lucenario Jr of the Philippines were killed along with the wives of the Malaysian and Indonesian ambassadors, as well as the helicopter’s two pilots, according to official tweets by the army, who warned that casualties could rise.

Polish ambassador Andrzej Ananiczolish and Dutch ambassador Marcel de Vink were also injured, the army added.

In an Urdu-language statement emailed by their main spokesman, Muhammad Khorasani, the Taliban said Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif was their target.

“The helicopter was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile, killing pilots and many foreign ambassadors,” the statement said.

It was not immediately possible to verify the claim, but the Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan’s north where the chopper came down is not known as a stronghold for the militant organisation.

An earlier statement by Mr Sharif’s office had said his plane was en route to the Gilgit area at the time of the attack but turned back to Islamabad after news of the crash broke.

A senior local administration official warned the situation was “urgent” after the helicopter — one of three carrying the delegation, their aides and members of the press — crashed into a school with children inside.

Mr Sharif “expressed deep grief and sorrow” over the incident, according to a statement issued by his office.

According to a list of passengers obtained by AFP, the ambassadors of Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Romania, Norway, South Africa, the Philippines and Poland were scheduled to fly on the helicopter.

“It was a diplomatic trip with members of 37 countries in total,” said a passenger in one of the helicopters, who requested anonymity, adding that the school had caught fire after the crash.

The passenger added that the air convoy was supposed to have included four helicopters but the number was later reduced to three.

A senior local administrative official said: “We have been told to send in as many ambulances as we can because the situation there is ‘urgent'”.

The injured were being air lifted to a military hospital in Gilgit, the region’s administrative capital, some 50 kilometres to the south-west, added another senior local police official.

In the city of Gilgit, a hospital official said injured were being carried on stretchers to the emergency ward of the Combined Military Hospital.

Known for its spectacular mountain ranges and unique culture, Gilgit-Baltistan is a strategically important autonomous region that borders China, Afghanistan and Indian-held Kashmir.

Nearly two weeks of clashes around Kunduz have forced thousands of people to flee their homes and posed the biggest challenge to the NATO-trained Afghan army and police since foreign combat troops withdrew at the end of last year.

Government forces have vowed that the northern provincial capital will not fall into the hands of the Taliban, who officials said were fighting alongside foreign jihadists.

But the difficulty they are having in driving insurgents from the southern district of Gul Tepa and other areas has raised fresh concerns about the strength of Afghan forces, 13 years after a US-backed intervention drove the hard-line Islamist Taliban from power.
Advertisement

The fighting prompted Afghan airline East Horizons to suspend its once-weekly flight from Kabul to Kunduz, the only commercial passenger air link to the northern city.

“Since there are security problems we have stopped,” said Omid Sahi, an official at the airline’s office in Kabul.

Kunduz police spokesman Sayed Sarwar Hussaini said that army and police, working with local anti-Taliban militias, killed 35 Taliban in the recent days, including eight foreign fighters.

“There is a woman among those who were killed,” he said, adding that the foreigners were identified as being from Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Chechnya in Russia.

The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan has long been a magnet for Islamist militants of many nationalities.

Officials have said some foreign jihadists operating in the area have sworn allegiance to Islamic State, the extremist group known in Afghanistan as Daesh that controls parts of Iraq and Syria.

However, Mr Hussaini said police had found the Taliban’s white flag along with the foreign fighters killed.

“We haven’t found any evidence that Daesh is involved in the Kunduz fighting,” he said.

The Taliban’s major push in the north, away from its traditional strongholds in the south and east of Afghanistan, is seen as a bid to take territory from areas where Afghan forces were spread thin.

Afghan security forces are suffering record casualties in their first battles against the Taliban since the US combat mission in Afghanistan ended in December after more than 13 years.

The number of killed and wounded so far this year was about 70 per cent higher than during the same period last year, said Colonel Brian Tribus, director of public affairs for NATO’s Afghanistan mission.

Last year’s casualty rates, which marked a fifth consecutive annual increase, were labelled in November as “not sustainable” by a top US general. With Afghan forces operating without the previous levels of US and NATO support that they previously enjoyed, the body count has soared.

“We are taking so many casualties, that’s the reality,” Afghan Interior Minister Nur al-haq Ulumi said. “We are fighting by ourselves.”

Pakistan’s military intelligence – Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) chief has secretly visited Kabul to meet President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani on Afghan reconciliation process.

A source informed of the visit have told Voice of America (VOA)/Ashna that Gen. Rizwan Akhtar visited Kabul on Wednesday to meet President Ghani.

The source speaking on the condition of said Gen. Akhtar reaffirmed Pakistan’s support to persuade the Taliban militants to join peace process.

The secret visit by ISI chief was also confirmed by the former Afghan intelligence – National Directorate of Security (NDS) chief Amrullah Saleh who took to Facebook calling the private and secret meeting Pakistan’s continued fraud diplomacy.

The visit by Gen. Akhtar comes as a two-day informal talks between the Afghan delegation and Taliban representatives concluded earlier this week over Afghan reconciliation process in Qatar.

In the meantime, the Afghan Senate House Speaker Fazal Hadi Muslimyar said earlier this week he is not optimistic regarding the peace process brought to us by Pakistan as the Afghan delegation is set to meet with the Taliban representatives in Qatar today.

Muslimyar said he is personally not convinced with the reconciliation process which comes through Pakistan and the main motive behind such efforts are not ascertained.

Muslimyar also added that both the Afghan and Pakistani governments should take practical steps in eliminating those groups who are funded from Pakistan, if both the nations are working together to bring peace and stability in the region.

Foreign fighters who claim allegiance to Islamic State are gathering dozens of recruits in eastern Afghanistan, luring would-be jihadis with generous resources and the group’s powerful brand, according to a Taliban fighter who has met several of their commanders.

The rapid and dramatic victories clocked up by Isis in Iraq, Syria and Libya have attracted some young men with specific grievances against government or foreign forces, who simply want the strongest possible allies.

Others seem drawn by the novelty of an upstart force, the Taliban veteran said, or by the apparently deep pockets of a group that boasts laptops, benevolent funds to help fighters’ families when in need and pick-up trucksinstead of the Taliban’s more modest motorbikes.

“This is something new in the market,” said the commander, who is based in Ghazni province, south-west of Kabul. “They think Isis is strong compared with the Taliban, and can help them achieve their goals.”

He agreed to the interview because of his concerns about the new arrivals, particularly Isis’s support for sectarian violence, but spoke on condition of anonymity.

Isis said in January it had expanded its self-declared caliphate to “Khorasan”, a historical region that includes Afghanistan and parts of neighbouring countries.

President Ashraf Ghani has warned of the “terrible threat” from the group. “Daesh (Isis) is already sending advance guards to southern and western Afghanistan to test for vulnerabilities,” he told the US Houses of Congress earlier this year.

Initial gains in southern Helmand, where the group recruited a former Taliban leader who had been held in Guantánamo Bay and had connections to the Middle East, were undermined when he was killed by a drone strike after just a couple of weeks.

Another cell has been confirmed in western Farah province, according to the Afghanistan Analysts’ Network. A video of Afghan and Pakistani militants swearing allegiance has been followed by reports of Isis fighters in many other parts of the country, although none have been confirmed.

Many of the foreign fighters in Ghazni and neighbouring areas only crossed into Afghanistan to escape a recent Pakistani military campaign, an elder from the area said, and it is unclear if they have genuine links to Isis, or are just hoping to capitalise on the group’s aura of success.

Even without direct connections, however, the successful recruiting campaign in eastern Afghanistan suggests that the Isis brand may be as much of a threat to the government and the Taliban as the movement itself.

“There has been over 30 years of civil war in Afghanistan, and these people are also bringing war. I have been fighting for over 30 years to solve our own problems, so how can a foreigner come and resolve them?” the fighter said.

So far there has been little tension between the Taliban and those claiming to fight for Isis, in part because the newcomers have kept a low profile, doing little more than gathering supporters.

“No one knows who is leading these people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at the moment what they are doing is recruiting,” the Taliban commander said. “They are in groups of a few dozen and do military exercises, going up mountains and down.”

He estimated that several districts have Isis units more than 100 men strong, although because they shun the informal black uniform embraced by the group elsewhere, the militants can be hard to identify or count.

“It’s difficult to get information about Isis in the provinces, because they are in normal clothes, many look just like Pashtuns. You don’t realise until you talk with them that they are foreigners,” he said.

Taliban commanders reluctant to open up a second front while fighting the government, and well aware that their fighters have been impressed by Isis victories in the Middle East, are warily tolerating the new arrivals.

For their part the Isis leaders insist that they are fighting for a larger Khorasan and have no permanent ambitions in the area, despite rich mineral deposits there.

“They said ‘We will coordinate with you, we are not going to be staying here a long time’,” the fighter said, adding that the Isis men were warm, even jovial, flinging their arms around his shoulders during the talks.

That warmth is unlikely to last if the foreigners have or forge real Isis links, and stay any length of time, as the two groups do not make natural allies in faith or politics.

Both want to set up states governed by sharia law, but the Taliban are essentially a nationalist group that wants to transform Afghanistan, while Isis does not recognise nation states and instead claims to be fighting for a regional caliphate.

And while to outsiders they might seem united by an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam, in fact they have serious religious differences. Most Taliban follow the Hanafi school; to the Salafi purists of Isis their beliefs are flawed.

“Whenever the public asks them what they are doing, they say ‘your faith is weak, we want to make it strong’,” the Talib said, citing the group’s fierce sectarianism and intolerance for shrines.

Through decades of war Afghanistan has largely avoided the sectarian violence that has devastated communities in neighbouring Pakistan and the Middle East.

However several recent attacks including a kidnapping near Ghazni have raised concerns that foreign fighters may be importing this particular blight to add to Afghanistan’s other troubles.

“They have the attitude that they want to kill all the Shia people living in the province, that’s why others are worried. The Shia pray, they know Allah, they have scholars, how can they [Isis] call them infidels?” he said.

Residents in areas with an Isis presence are mostly very devout, and unhappy about a group that questions their faith, threatens their way of life, and is reported to have burned one shrine, but they feel helpless to stop them.

“[Isis] are not powerful enough to stop people going to school or control the clinics, but people are pessimistic and can see that things will go badly,” the fighter said.

“The mullahs and Islamic scholars in these remote areas … don’t dare to take a stand against them, because [Isis] will easily shoot and kill people.”

Intelligence Bureau-led operations have revealed that Syria-based terror operatives, suspected to be part of the Islamic State, have planned attacks on leaders of the BJP and the RSS and police officials in the country including in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Investigations over the last few days following the busting of a terror module by the Madhya Pradesh Anti-Terrorism Squad found that the group was being persuaded to carry out terrorist strikes in India.

Following the arrest of several terror suspects in Hyderabad and the death of IS recruit Ateef Waseem of Mancherial in Adilabad district in Syria, intelligence agencies have been on high alert. The IB said that the MP ATS had arrested four residents of Ratlam.

Six soldiers have embraced martyrdom whereas 102 militants were killed in separate military operations across the country in past 24 hours, a statement issued by the Ministry of Defense states.

According to the statement six soldiers embraced martyrdom due to a landmine explosion and militant heavy weapon fire. The statement does not contain information about the exact location of the insurgent attacks.

Ministry of Defense (MoD) press release further states that the 102 militants killed included 10 local commanders of the group and 11 foreign insurgents.