Acceptance –
A shootout takes place between the troops Taliban and the Afghan resistance struggle of national opposition groups. In the incident, as many as 8 groups of Afghan fighters were killed by the Taliban.
Reported by AFP, Friday (21/2/2022), since retaking Afghanistan, the Taliban has firmly faced organized resistance. Meanwhile, the shootout occurred on Thursday local time.
Fighters from the National Resistance Front (NRF), a group led by the son of the late legendary anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, are battling Taliban forces in Balkh province.
A total of 8 NRF fighters were killed in “direct clashes” with Taliban. This was revealed by provincial police spokesman Asif Waziri to reporters in a voice message.
Waziri said Taliban forces also seized ammunition and machine guns from the NRF fighters. Meanwhile, an NRF spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.
The fighting comes less than two weeks after Taliban foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi held talks with Ahmad Massoud, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, in Tehran.
After the summit, a resistance faction official said the NRF and the Taliban remained on “separate pages” with no prospect of reconciliation.
Massoud’s NRF team was the last to defend against the Taliban takeover last year. They retreated to the Panjshir Valley which fell in September, weeks after government forces surrendered.
The Panjshir Valley was famous as a place of resistance against Soviet forces in the 1980s and the Taliban in the late 1990s.
His most revered figure is Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the “Lion of Panjshir”, who was killed by Al-Qaeda in 2001, two days before the 9/11 attacks.
His son has since taken over leadership and there have been reports of his efforts to organize resistance with other exiled Afghan leaders. But this has so far been denied by the Taliban authorities.
Taliban also faced resistance from the regional branch of the Islamic State, IS-Khorasan. They are an extremist group that aims to create a global caliphate.
(lir/lir)
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